Martin Wilner
Making History: Case Histories, September 2014: Elias Herder, 2014
Pen and ink on Bristol board
41.9 x 43.5 cm
16 1/2 x 17 1/8 in
16 1/2 x 17 1/8 in
Information: Martin Wilner (b. New York, USA, 1959) began making art in the 1990's after previously studying medicine and being a practicing psychoanalyst. As both an artist and a psychiatrist...
Information:
Martin Wilner (b. New York, USA, 1959) began making art in the 1990's after previously studying medicine and being a practicing psychoanalyst. As both an artist and a psychiatrist by training, Wilner uses imagery to locate the unconscious elements in language and life, his practice posing profound questions about the creative process, collaboration and the imagination. He lives and works in New York.
Making History is a time-based project initiated in January of 2002 that utilizes the convention of the Roman calendar to telegraph the notion of the passage of time over the course of each month. Wilner selects a daily subject of interest to him from a variety of media sources and visualizes them each day as a drawing that would coalesce into a completed work by the end of each month. Elements of cartoon, cartography, text, micrography, and music have evolved into essential aspects of his creative vocabulary. On the verso of each drawing are descriptive texts or images that are integral to the work.
Upon completion of a decade of this project in 2012, Wilner elected to push the creative envelope of this parameter-based body of work by inviting individuals familiar with his work to correspond with him daily for a month-long period and send him messages describing what they found of compelling interest to them on each day of their assigned month. He would then visualize each correspondence daily to produce the composite work by month's end. ‘I was drawn to the idea of collaboration […] and so I've been inviting people to correspond with me, asking them to send me what's on their mind, what's compelling to them, each and every day for a month. And I do a drawing on each day—a visualization based on that experience. Over the course of the month it coalesces into a kind of portrait of the subject over time.’ (quotation from ‘Artists in Conversation’ with Francis Levy, BOMB 130, Winter 2015).
Elias Herder (September):
Elias Herder is the son of artist Jonathan Herder and writer Mariah Corrigan and was nine years old at the time of Wilner creating his portrait. Elias is a member of Mensa, the high IQ society, which provides a forum for intellectual exchange among its members. Membership is only open to individuals with exceptionally high IQ’s, which is within the top two percent of the population. There are members in more than 100 countries in the world.
Jonathan Herder is an American artist who was born in 1965. After studying Philosophy at the State University of New York and for a master’s in fine art at the Art Center College of Design in California, he has exhibited widely in a number of solo and group exhibitions across America. He also has work within the Collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Elias’ mother, Mariah Corrigan is an artist, designer and cultural critic as well as former professor at NYU and Parsons School of Design. She has also been honoured to be an NYC teaching fellow, a learning leader and founding member of various community organisations in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in and been written about in The Village Voice, Time Out and The New York Times. Mariah is also part of the Greater New York Mensa organisation, acting as Gifted Children’s Resources Coordinator.
Martin Wilner (b. New York, USA, 1959) began making art in the 1990's after previously studying medicine and being a practicing psychoanalyst. As both an artist and a psychiatrist by training, Wilner uses imagery to locate the unconscious elements in language and life, his practice posing profound questions about the creative process, collaboration and the imagination. He lives and works in New York.
Making History is a time-based project initiated in January of 2002 that utilizes the convention of the Roman calendar to telegraph the notion of the passage of time over the course of each month. Wilner selects a daily subject of interest to him from a variety of media sources and visualizes them each day as a drawing that would coalesce into a completed work by the end of each month. Elements of cartoon, cartography, text, micrography, and music have evolved into essential aspects of his creative vocabulary. On the verso of each drawing are descriptive texts or images that are integral to the work.
Upon completion of a decade of this project in 2012, Wilner elected to push the creative envelope of this parameter-based body of work by inviting individuals familiar with his work to correspond with him daily for a month-long period and send him messages describing what they found of compelling interest to them on each day of their assigned month. He would then visualize each correspondence daily to produce the composite work by month's end. ‘I was drawn to the idea of collaboration […] and so I've been inviting people to correspond with me, asking them to send me what's on their mind, what's compelling to them, each and every day for a month. And I do a drawing on each day—a visualization based on that experience. Over the course of the month it coalesces into a kind of portrait of the subject over time.’ (quotation from ‘Artists in Conversation’ with Francis Levy, BOMB 130, Winter 2015).
Elias Herder (September):
Elias Herder is the son of artist Jonathan Herder and writer Mariah Corrigan and was nine years old at the time of Wilner creating his portrait. Elias is a member of Mensa, the high IQ society, which provides a forum for intellectual exchange among its members. Membership is only open to individuals with exceptionally high IQ’s, which is within the top two percent of the population. There are members in more than 100 countries in the world.
Jonathan Herder is an American artist who was born in 1965. After studying Philosophy at the State University of New York and for a master’s in fine art at the Art Center College of Design in California, he has exhibited widely in a number of solo and group exhibitions across America. He also has work within the Collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Elias’ mother, Mariah Corrigan is an artist, designer and cultural critic as well as former professor at NYU and Parsons School of Design. She has also been honoured to be an NYC teaching fellow, a learning leader and founding member of various community organisations in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in and been written about in The Village Voice, Time Out and The New York Times. Mariah is also part of the Greater New York Mensa organisation, acting as Gifted Children’s Resources Coordinator.