Wiley’s core pursuit has always been highlighting the discrepancies between the experience of reality and the unconsciously internalized maps of it that we take for granted. No doubt, if Wiley were less inclined toward making an elaborate mockery of the pretensions advanced by the Minimalist cult of absolute presence, Jacques Derrida might well have written a maddingly complex essay about the ways Wiley’s work embodied his post-structuralist theories about the slippages, ruptures and inversions that often occur between signs and what they portend to signify. But where would be the fun in that?
The affirmative answer resides in Monumental, the first posthumous exhibition of Wiley’s work since he died on April 21. It exceeds all expectations.
