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Immigrant Experience To Inspire CTA Art By Bridgeport Man

By Ted Cox | October 26, 2016 5:32am | Updated on October 27, 2016 8:51am
 Artist Mathew Wilson intends to draw on his own immigrant experience and what we all share on that note in a new piece of art at the Diversey CTA
Artist Mathew Wilson intends to draw on his own immigrant experience and what we all share on that note in a new piece of art at the Diversey CTA "L" station.
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DNAinfo/Ted Cox

LINCOLN PARK — Artist Mathew Wilson has set himself the task of creating the extraordinary out of the ordinary, so what better person to transform the plainness of the Diversey CTA "L" station?

Last week, Wilson was one of four artists selected to transform four CTA stations: two being from Chicago and two from elsewhere in the United States. Wilson is one of the Chicagoans, an art teacher at the School of the Art Institute and Columbia College, but he is also a British transplant, and his proposal "to create a work that deals directly — or perhaps more tangentially, it depends — with immigration" won him the commission from the CTA in an intense competition against 350 other artists.

 Artist Mathew Wilson has a relatively blank slate to work with at the CTA
Artist Mathew Wilson has a relatively blank slate to work with at the CTA "L" Station.
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DNAinfo/Ted Cox

"Everyone's from somewhere else," Wilson said Monday, directly if not ultimately in heritage, and he wants to create a work that reflects that, our common uniqueness, not the divisive rhetoric of the ongoing presidential campaign.

"We're in the midst of a political cycle here where — not for the first time in history — immigrants are being blamed for abuses of all sorts," Wilson said, adding that he's out to convey "not necessarily immigration as it's understood in the election, but more broadly."

Wilson said, "I wanted to make a piece that talks to how people change when they move, when they emigrate or when they get displaced.

"All of us retain something of our former selves when we move," he added. "But we'll also assimilate, and there's a sort of tension involved in doing that.

"We all experience something like that. We move from one state to another or one town to the next. We all lose something and assimilate something else."

How exactly will Wilson depict that? That's where the art's involved, of course, and he said he was in the "very early stages" of what figures to be "quite an extensive process," although one to be completed in six months to a year.

A Bridgeport resident, Wilson hasn't yet been to visit the Diversey station, 943 W. Diversey Parkway, and he said the CTA has yet to say exactly where it wants the piece to go. "Of course, that's going to figure in the decision-making," Wilson added. Yet the nature of the project should dictate the materials.

"With these kinds of projects," Wilson said, "there are certain limitations because you're got to use materials that are durable and cleanable and weather-resistant and graffiti-resistant. So I'm likely to go with something like a mosaic tile."

Wilson has partnered for 13 years with Adam Brooks on an artistic collaboration called Industry of the Ordinary, "dedicated to an exploration and celebration of the customary, the everyday, and the usual."

Their work has included a neon sign placed at various locations reading, "Vote for Me," and a series of billboards bearing the fragment message "I Want/To Be/Ordinary." There are also "I want to be ordinary" T-shirts.

Yet, while his CTA project has some parallels with that previous work, in finding the universal in the personal and vice versa, it is a departure, especially as a solo piece.

"I tend to stay put, so there's a little bit of nervousness going into this project," Wilson said. "But I think it will be a good experience."

And, in doing a public art project for a CTA station, there's one other thing he's leery about.

"I've got to have a sort of public forum to meet people who are interested from the neighborhood," Wilson said, "which strikes me as quite terrifying."

On the other hand, all he'll have to sell local residents on is where they're from and where they'll be going on the CTA.

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