Glen Wilson | TexarkanaCaliCool / Relaxing With Mr. Dafney

Glen Wilson is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, California. With roots stretching back to documentary and street photography, his body of work includes sculpture, assemblage, installation, and filmmaking. Recent works layer imagery with found and constructed materials that encourage the viewer to engage the work's physical and conceptual qualities. His work, TexarkanaCaliCool / Relaxing With Mr. Dafney (2019) is now on view at ONE in Logan Heights until July 8, 2023. 

TexarkanaCaliCool / Relaxing With Mr. Dafney, a tapestry from Wilson’s ongoing “GateKeeping” series, presents original photography woven through the grid of galvanized and interconnected steel wire of chain-link gates and fencing salvaged from Venice Beach, where Wilson lives, and other similar communities across the country. 

The subject of the side-by-side photographic imagery is the titular Mr. Dafney, Wilson’s former neighbor in Oakwood, an historically African-American section within Venice Beach. Originally from Texarkana, a geographically converged town on the border of two states, Mr. Dafney was one of the millions of Black Americans that migrated to parts north and west to leave behind a Jim Crow-era South, eventually settling in Southern California. A fixture of the historically redlined neighborhood, he was often found smoking his tobacco pipe while storytelling and holding court on his porch with friends and passersby.

Wilson recontextualizes the chainlink fence as an object of collective memory in urbanscapes across America, wherein the opening and closing of the gate acts as a neighborhood metronome. These rhythms: arrivals and departures, open, shut, and the drift of smoke, inhaled on the left and seemingly exhaled to the right, evoke a force of constant movement, migration, and visual poetry that extends through the whole of Wilson’s artistic practice.

Concurrent with his art practice, Wilson has worked as a photographer on more than forty feature films, and has directed short form films and music videos. “Revolution By Design: Spike Lee x Emory Douglas”, presents a kitchen table dialogue between the artist and filmmaker, within the historical context of the struggle to protect black lives. “Betye Saar / Present Tense” and “RE: Henry Taylor” offer lyrical glimpses of each artist at work in their studios.

Wilson's works have been exhibited at The Getty Center, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the California African-American Museum, ICA:LA, the Torrance Art Museum, Frieze Art: London and in public parks in New York and Los Angeles. His work is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and other private collections. He completed an MFA at the University of California, San Diego, and received his BA from Yale University.