BORDER BOOK FESTIVAL
FEATURED WRITER AND ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

LILIANA WILSON

Liliana Wilson was born in Valparaíso, Chile. She earned a law degree in Chile and studied art at Southwest Texas State University.

Her work deals with intense social, political and emotional barriers which create a subtle sense of turmoil. Through her drawings and paintings, she explores the power of complex emotions implicit in the human struggle for integrity. Her images come from the subconscious - realities collide on multiple levels while beauty emanates from her subjects.

Wilson has received numerous awards including Best of Show at Works on Paper 2000 at the Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto. Her drawings and paintings have been exhibited numerous museums and galleries in Texas and California.

“I want to think of myself as a spirit walking on the earth, and in that way I can remember I am going to die.” Wilson’s efforts to remind herself of her mortality center in her desire to live a meaningful existence. Her objective is to maximize her time her on earth. Her subjects are human, but they emit the ethereal quality of spirits, with their fates caught in the balance of the paintings.

Most of her early paintings sought to process the trauma she had witnessed in Chile that coincided with the dramatic political changes there that followed the 1970 election of Salvador Allende and the subsequent military coup in 1973 that initiated a wave of well-documented and horrifying human rights violations with thousands of people losing their lives.

Wilson first came to visit the U.S. in 1977 and ended up staying in Texas. There she returned to art, one of her first loves. Increasingly, her paintings begin to grapple with feeling an outsider in the U.S.
She found herself in what writer Gloria Anzaldúa calls “Nepantla,” the land inbetween, the midway point between the conscious and the unconscious, neither a Chilean or an American. This triggered a series of paintings that show people caught between worlds. Their circumstances appear surreal, a young boy wrapped in barbed wire, three people like birds in a cage, a woman marrying a man with a bird’s head. The works represent a moment when human action might change the fates of their subjects.

The viewer is invited to take action and to recognize that the human conditions Wilson portrays are real-life situations that we can change, for ourselves, and others.

There is an ethereal, otherworldly beauty in all of Wilson’s work that also lures the viewer to a place of hidden messages, mystical tales untold and lives to be lived. Hers is a work of possibility and hope, of reaching for the stars and juggling them with a wonderful sense of wonder and play as in the painting, Estrella.

The paintings are intimate and moving, they tell stories but the outcome is up to the viewer. In her maturation as an artist and in her quiet of peace, Wilson seeks to visualize her hopes for us all.

She states, “As a Latin American woman who has lived through a dictatorship in Chile, I use art to give meaning to a life history that is at once hard to confront and important to remember. My experiences as an immigrant infuse the context of the subjects in my pieces who often face human dilemmas including domination by societal forces. Through my drawings and paintings, I explore the transformative power of complex emotions implicit in the human struggle for integrity. My images come from the subconscious. Many of the figures I create appear in "other-worlds" environments where their outward composure is in direct contrast to their inner turmoil. Realities collide on multiple levels while beauty emanates from the subjects. Often my compositions represent moments in the lives of individuals that serve as metaphors for those lives.”

Please visit Liliana Wilson’s website at www.lilianawilson.com