2 May – 16 June 2007
For his fourth show at Sadie Coles HQ, the American artist TJ Wilcox presents three separate films united under one title, A Fair Tale (Extended Mix), as well as six large-scale collages relating to the film’s protagonists. All three films are biographical collages which incorporate a mixture of found footage and original film, and continue the artist’s modernist investigation into the genres of narrative film.
“Wilcox … doesn’t accept the documentary elements of … life as the only truth worth reckoning with. Nor does he allow the truth to hamper the metaphorical veracity of his characters. …As a kind of happy pendant, Wilcox looks at both sides of the story: truth and illusion. So doing, he makes us look at the truth in fiction, the facts to be found in these voices.”
Hilton Als, T.J. Wilcox, Garlands, 2006
The longest of the three films, A Fair Tale takes us on an enchanted journey through small-town America in the 1970s, a silent memory seen through a child’s eyes and narrated with short, clear subtitles. In the five-minute-long film, we follow a seven-year-old TJ as his parents’ hippie friends take him on a trip in their Volkswagen Vanagon to a county fair in the quaintly-named town of Pullayup. Through his eyes we watch pig races, Native American dancing and skydivers falling from the sky. We share the young boy’s amazement and happiness when he is covered by a parachute from a rogue skydiver and rescued from his silk prison by none other than the Indian chief himself! This is a naïve tale of an innocent yet exciting experience which stays in the mind of a young child.
The other films in the exhibition trilogy, Sissi and The Jerry Hall Story, track the lives of two iconic women living in very different times. Sissi focuses on the tragic life of the Bavarian heroine, Empress Elizabeth of Austria. In this film, Wilcox draws on Sissi’s unhappy marriage at the age of nineteen to her cousin Franz Joseph, whom she grew to despise. After having her four children kept from her and raised by their grandmother she became increasingly erratic and obsessive. In 1898 poor Sissi’s unhappy life came to an end when she was assassinated by an anarchist whilst walking by Lake Geneva. Wilcox positions the story around her love of horses and mixes footage of Lipizzaners shot in Texas with appropriated cuts from a cult narrative of her life.
The Jerry Hall Story tells the unlikely rags-to-riches story of the iconic model who started her career after winning eight-hundred dollars in compensation after a car accident. She moved to Paris, became queen of the disco, launched her modeling career and became engaged to Brian Ferry. Wilcox collages film he shot in Texas, Jerry Hall’s home state, with archival footage of the model.
TJ Wilcox has recently exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and has had film screenings at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Tate Modern, London and MOMA in New York. He lives and works in New York.
Garlands
3 June - 5 July 2003
For his third exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, American artist T.J. Wilcox presents twelve new films as a series of sketches representing the artist’s varied methodology. All sub-titled Garlands, and made to be shown together, the short silent films will be screened simultaneously on three projectors.
As in previous works, Wilcox uses a combination of found footage, collaged animation and his own films to make mini-narratives. The works in this show include Strawberry, a film of a fetishized strawberry plant in the artist’s garden which came to obliquely represent innocence and growth post 9/11. There are also Garlands about the artist’s beloved stepmother, Ann; a segment about Ortino, the pet dog of the Romanoff Princesses who was massacred alongside his owners which uses archive footage of Tatiana and Ortino to narrate the death of the innocent; a tribute to the romance of travel with Around the World in 80 Seconds using money shots of the world’s great tourist destinations; Bee Movie, about beekeeping and the magical rituals and mythology inherent in the production of nature’s most impressive alchemical substance; the story of Ara Tripp, a transsexual from Wilcox’s home town, a former construction worker who had a sex change and who climbed to the top of a local powerline, topless, to campaign about a woman’s right to bare breasts. Other films examine melting polar ice caps, Humpty Dumpty, sunsets, tree planting and the annunciation of Christ. Linking the Garlands is their melancholic ruminations on innocence, romance and courage.
T.J. Wilcox will be showing all his earlier films, The Escape (of Marie Antoinette), The Death and Burial of the First Emperor of China, Stephen Tennant Homage, Midnight Movie, Ladies’ Room (20 Questions), The Funeral of Marlene Dietrich, Hadrian and Antinous, and The Little Elephant in the Starr Auditorium at Tate Modern, Sunday 1 June at 3pm, The screenings will be followed by a conversation between Wilcox and the independent curator, Ian White.