Kat Wilson

The series, UFO: Ultra Flattened Objects, captures my small sliver of sky in the Ozarks and the strange qualities of the other–the spaces we can’t completely occupy—places beyond bounds. Over the summer, I was at home in my backyard watching the night sky change. I navigated a path through tree limbs and leaves with my camera lens.

When the James Webb Space Telescope launched, its mission was to glimpse the early universe and search for the unobserved formation of the first galaxies. Beyond cosmic history, Webb was designed to study stars as they are forming now in their dusty cocoons. Like Webb, I hoped my images would chronicle a place beyond a singular moment. A sky that talks back to itself in shades of red clay and rose. I wanted to hear voluptuous blues. I wanted the muted green of the past and bright streaks of the future.

That’s how I came to Mars, imagining Webb capturing infrared images of trace organics in the Martian atmosphere. The universe is abundant, the potential for life is abundant. When I zoom out, I’m struck by what a small part of all this I am. It’s a different frequency to sit with these images and to layer them and to build a visual poem, which is a different type of rigor and rhythm.

Biography

Kat Wilson is an experimental artist based in Northwest Arkansas, where she received her MFA and co-founded the non-profit gallery Bottle Rocket.Wilson’s work is theatrical, participatory, and humanistic and often involves collaboration with others, including, in many photography projects, the subjects of the photos themselves. Early in her career, Wilson gained national success with her Habitats series of digital photographs, which, like her current #SelfieThrones and Warrior Women series, uses centuries-old compositional devices to create a sense of transcendence. Wilson’s work has been published in Communication Arts, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post, displayed at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and projected at The Louvre, among others.