As we move, experiences become more fragmented. Are we moving forward? At inconsistent points of transitions in speed, perspectives blur. Are we seeing clearly?
Aaron Wilder is a curator and 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.
Wilder’s practice seeks to investigate social constructs. A social construct is a mechanism or category developed by society that forwards perception of an individual or group that is created culturally as opposed to biologically. Social constructs include gender, race, religion, and many other groupings. These social constructs are perpetuated by how a child is raised, language and other communication practices, and visible signs including advertising, popular culture, and education. While there are some innocuous impacts of social constructs, there are also many negative aspects, including sustaining systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Wilder’s intent is to foster dialogue about the multiple, intersecting forms of social construction in our culture and the pervasive, dominant narratives perpetuating them.
Memory is an important material with which Wilder works. When he was 17 years old, Wilder was in a near-fatal car accident. His biological function of remembering has since been unreliable to the point where it becomes difficult to distinguish between memory's relation to fact and memory's relation to fiction. Just as he was extricated from that automobile in 2003, each attempt to disentangle his brain's own remembering functionality is an attempted extrication of reality from Wilder's flawed recollection.
Inspiration in Wilder's practice is represented as ideas passing through the filters of social construction, memory, and perspective. The result of that filtering then dictates the materials and methods through which concepts are expressed, displayed, and discussed.
Originally from Arizona, Aaron Wilder has also lived in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and France and currently resides in Roswell, New Mexico. With the experience of being a self-taught artist since 2002, Wilder received his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2017. He has exhibited his art extensively across the United States as well as in Italy. Wilder became an artist member of Amos Eno Gallery in New York in 2020. His 2025 solo exhibition there, Contact Traces, was named “High Brow/Brilliant” in New York Magazine’s The Approval Matrix. On the occasion of that exhibition, Wilder was interviewed by Noah Becker for Whitehot Magazine and he was featured in Hyperallergic's A View from the Easel. Wilder was the curator and interim director of the art gallery at San José State University in California 2017-2019 where he curated the exhibition Reinterpretation as Resistance: Artists Questioning Normative Iconography. He is currently the curator of collections and exhibitions at the Roswell Museum. There he co-curated the contemporary art exhibition Future Shock: (Re)Visions of Tomorrow featuring artists from around the world. He also launched new exhibitions, including regional collaborations with peer institutions to highlight underrecognized artists like Patrociño Barela and invitationals to recent graduates of nearby MFA programs to amplify the voices of emerging artists like Dina Perlasca. Wilder has served on many juries, including the New York Foundation for the Arts’ Medical Emergency Grant, the Roswell Artist-in-Residence program, and Southwest Contemporary’s 12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now.
Photo credit: Johnnie Lujan
