Whitehot Magazine: Contact Traces is deeply personal, reflecting your own experiences of displacement and isolation during the pandemic. What was the turning point that made you decide to process these experiences through art?

Aaron Wilder: Art is often the filter through which I process past and present experiences, so there isn’t necessarily a specific turning point to identify. Isolation and displacement weren’t new to me at the onset of the pandemic, but their effects became significantly more acute. All of my work is personal to varying degrees. Something on display in Contact Traces is a throughline of individual separation (not self-initiated) from social (meaning inter-personal) processes.

WM: The exhibition explores barriers—both literal and symbolic—in human relationships, space, and time. How do you see these barriers manifesting in today’s world beyond the pandemic?

AW: In this show, I am exhibiting work that is focusing on barriers from before, during, and after the pandemic’s shelter-in-place. Today, we have barriers from before the pandemic fortified by distrust and physical separation ingrained in the pandemic itself. While me-oriented, my exhibited works are an invitation to viewers to evaluate individual, social, and globally systemic barriers and how those impact them personally. Barriers are a fact of human life, but our contemporary reality seems particularly fixated on boundaries. From the US-Mexico border to Gaza to our own picket fences we protect with shotguns, notions of separation become stronger and stronger, significantly impacting our self- and worldview.



Aaron Wilder, Social Boundaries: Nob Hill 21, 2018, Digital Scan of 35mm Film, 15x16”


WM: Your Social Boundaries photography project predates COVID-19 but takes on new meaning in this context. How did the pandemic shift your perspective on these physical and social divisions?

AW: The premise of my Social Boundaries project is simple. I traverse supposed neighborhood boundaries, photographing physical barriers I encounter along the way. These barriers are both beautiful and devastating/isolating. Pre-pandemic, my experience was that San Francisco was difficult to stomach. I sensed on a daily basis the fallout of an increasingly privatized social experience engineered by the unchecked economic power of tech companies and the effects on everyday interactions were/are profound. Post-shelter-in-place these physical and social divisions are even more pronounced than before. The tech industry boomed during the pandemic and the social domino effects cascaded down like refuse water. In current daily life, it seems like walls are everyone’s favorite architectural feature. To me, it feels like doors, windows, roads, and bridges are all subservient to fortifications. So, in a sense, the pandemic shifted my perspective on physical and social divisions in a significantly negative direction.

Aaron Wilder, Invisible Self-Portrait / Expletive Chapel: Lavender Heights, 2019, Image Still of Digital Video with Audio, 16 minutes, 40 seconds


WM: In your video piece, you explore invisibility through layered sounds of slurs, transforming them into something meditative. Can you speak about the role of sound and repetition in this work?

AW: Invisible Self-Portrait / Expletive Chapel: Lavender Heights is a complex, multi-layered piece. I often find it difficult to explain. My long-term project Expletive seeks to disempower derogatory slurs by obscuring words by overlapping the letters of the word on top of each other. Aesthetically, this takes the form of fragments from the overlapping of individual letters. The most important part is that the word becomes unrecognizable and as a result its power is taken away. This video was created for a solo exhibition I had at the InsideOut in Sacramento, California in 2019. The show was entitled Expletive Chapel: Lavender Heights. The video was the centerpiece of the installation. Its audio is the sound of me pronouncing each letter of a slur referring to the LGBTQ+ community layered so that the sound of all letters in the word are heard together; again removing the power from the slur. The visual in this video is an abstract colorization of a self-portrait in the dark. The photo was captured in the reflection of my face in the dark rear-view-seat screen of a flight on a redeye. The video’s slow movement is a meditation on shape-shifting from all positive to all negative visual space. The video’s audio is also abstract. The sound of me pronouncing each letter of a slur stacked on top of each other has the audio effect of a meditative chant. To experience this work, it asks the viewer for a lot of patience. Many attendees may not have the ability or desire to understand it, and that is always a possibility with contemporary art.



Aaron Wilder, Before Exile 30, 2023, Ink, Pastel on Resin Coated Silver Print, 8x10”

WM: Before Exile grapples with feelings of forced departure from San Francisco. Looking back, do you see this series as an act of mourning, resilience, or something in between?

AW: Before Exile is an act of mourning. I have relocated many times for a number of reasons, including education and employment. Nearly every place I have left I did so on my own terms with one exception: San Francisco. I lived in San Francisco from August 2015 to April 2020. I had hoped to thrive in San Francisco, but I did not. It was a struggle. I learned a lot living there, but I learned those lessons the hard way. I technically accomplished what I set out to do in moving to San Francisco: I received my MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2017. I worked quite hard cobbling together a career in the arts after graduating. Despite my best efforts, I made no friends. The harder I tried, the more despised I felt. With my multiple part-time jobs, I was barely able to afford my rent. From December 2019 to April 2020, I lost every single part-time job I had, only partially due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I was forced to leave as I couldn't pay rent without a paycheck. I felt robbed of the opportunity to leave San Francisco on my own terms. So, for the first couple years, I felt incapable of coming to terms with what felt like defeat, a kind of exile. In 2023 I found a box of black and white film photography test prints that were used in a trial and error way to arrive at what would become a final print while I was a student. Of no value as themselves, I asked myself why I had kept them. I didn't have an answer and I still don't, but as I drew on them, I reflected on my experiences living in San Francisco and the circumstances that forced me to leave. “Before Exile” is a series of 40 mixed media drawings on photographic test prints. While I've numbered them to be sequential, they don't necessarily tell a cohesive, linear story. Instead, I see each drawing as an access portal to memories and abstractly experienced feelings I cannot articulate. For me, this was an exercise in attempting to mourn the death of my hopeful expectations about moving to San Francisco in 2015 as well as the death of the plethora of negative experiences I had there.



Aaron Wilder, Abundance of Caution: Out of Order, 2024, Digital Collage, 20x20”

WM: The phrase “abundance of caution” became omnipresent during the pandemic. Your collages investigate warnings and fear. Do you think society is still living in a heightened state of caution, or have we moved on?

AW: Post-pandemic our society is still living in a state of caution. Most of these areas of caution existed before the pandemic, such as PPE in the healthcare industry and property lines in defending stand-your-ground laws where people are empowered to defend their properties with firearms. Things are more cautious than ever for sure. 



Aaron Wilder, Abundance of Caution: Survivors Will Be Shot Again, 2024, Digital Collage, 20x20”

WM: Your work spans photography, video, mixed media, and digital collage. How do you decide which medium best conveys the emotions or themes you’re exploring in a given series?

AW: As an interdisciplinary artist, I start with an idea and then investigate that idea with the knowledge and experience I have to successfully execute a finished work. I have broad experience with photography, video, drawing, painting, etc. I explore other areas as I have opportunity to do so. Some projects, like Social Boundaries, are best realized in black and white film photography whereas Before Exile provided the opportunity to create drawings on top of discarded film test prints.



Aaron Wilder, Before Exile 15, 2023, Ink, Pastel on Resin Coated Silver Print, 10x8”

WM: How has your artistic practice evolved as a result of the pandemic and your relocation? Do you see Contact Traces as a closing chapter, or does this exploration continue in your newer work?

AW: The isolation continues, although for different reasons than during the pandemic. In a way, I suppose Contact Traces is a closing chapter, but of what I’m not totally certain. The exhibition represents me allowing myself to come to terms with the effects of the pandemic. I didn’t allow myself to process the pandemic’s effects on me before both because it felt too raw and also because I initially worried about how a show about the pandemic’s impacts on me would likely be viewed negatively. I ultimately decided I didn’t care if the show is viewed negatively for being too cathartic or trite. The need to publicly name my isolation and move forward felt more important. With Contact Traces out there in the world, I look forward to a new era of evolution in my artistic practice.

WM: This exhibition invites viewers to reflect on their own pandemic experiences. What conversations do you hope Contact Traces sparks, and how do you see the audience’s role in completing the work?

AW: I’m hoping that those, like me, who didn’t give themselves permission to sit with and think about the pandemic’s effects on them will be prompted by Contact Traces to finally do so. The exhibition is also organized in a way where I’m hoping juxtaposition of different bodies of work will invite dialogue. For example, Before Exile and Invisible Self-Portrait / Expletive Chapel: Lavender Heights are in the back of the gallery in a smaller, more intimate space. I hope that intimacy invites viewers to follow the throughlines of those two projects to reflect on their personal feelings stemming from the shelter-in-place. Abundance of Caution and Social Boundaries are displayed across from each other in the front of the gallery. The intent is the chaos and confrontation of Abundance of Caution and the quiet order of Social Boundaries will invite viewers to complete the work of identifying their own position to the kind of barriers they encounter and are able to identify a resolution for themselves to move beyond.



Aaron Wilder, Social Boundaries: Nob Hill 69, 2018, Digital Scan of 35mm Film, Dimensions: 21x14”

WM: What’s next for you? Are there new themes or directions you’re eager to explore in your work? 

AW: I’m eager to work on more video, particularly taking some of the aesthetic strategies in Abundance of Caution to create moving collages. There are also sculptures I want to make. I’ve worked in 3D media before, but it’s been a while. There are some knowledge gaps I need to fill in on that front. And then there are projects I shelved during the pandemic I want to revisit.


Contact Traces is on view March 20-April 27 at Amos Eno Gallery in Manhattan’s Lower East Side: 191 Henry Street.