By
Aaron Wilder
Piece description from the artist
“Green Matter / Gray Space” is a play on words from the terms “green space” (an area of grass, trees, or other vegetation set apart for recreational or aesthetic purposes in an otherwise urban environment) and “gray matter” (the darker tissue of the brain and spinal cord, consisting mainly of nerve cell bodies and branching dendrites). The increasing population growth in cities calls into question (or enters into a gray area) the future of green space. When every area of a city is constructed for housing and other buildings, the area of green space per capita shrinks. If the vegetation that has, over time, been ripped out to make space for more human activity can be thought of as the gray matter of the ecosystem, what is it that we are doing to the intelligence of our planet’s environment? With climate change, our insatiable waste, and minimization of plant life, how will our health as city dwellers be impacted by the diminishing environment we rely upon for water, air, and food?
Aaron Wilder is an interdisciplinary artist who mixes painting, collage, photography, graphic design, video, sound, writing, sculpture, and installation to blur boundaries between the analog and the digital, the public and the private, and the unassuming and the instigative. He uses his own experiences and sense of identity as a lens through which he explores the introspective and social processes of contemporary culture. Through an analytical deconstruction of these processes, his artistic approach is akin to that of an anthropologist, sociologist, and psychologist combined. Wilder’s concept-driven projects all incorporate his core belief that art can and should be used as a tool for generating critical thinking, dialogue, knowledge sharing, and understanding between individuals with divergent world perspectives.
Originally from Arizona, Aaron Wilder has also lived in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and France and currently resides in Chicago. Wilder has been creating art since 2002 and has shown at exhibitions in Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington, and Washington, DC as well as Italy. Wilder received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2017 and has been featured in 25 solo exhibitions and 96 group exhibitions.
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