Martin Wilner

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Wilmer's ongoing "Journal of Evidence Weekly" offers an illustrated compendium of the artist's travels around New York City. Contained within a dense network of interconnected lines (a style that echoes the structure of the city's public transit system) are fragments of text documenting details of the starting point, destination and specific mode of transport taken, snippets of overheard conversations, conductors' announcements, excerpts of music played by buskers or leaked from headphones, and the onomatopoeic sounds of the machinery. These are joined by figural representations of fellow passengers, executed in a manner that ranges from the hyper-realist to the grotesque (odd body parts fused together) and the fetishistic (isolated images of womens' chests, legs and feet). For Wilmer, who works as a practicing psychiatrist, the accumulation of details taken from daily life allows him to search for the "hidden themes" and "whispered melodies" that exist in the unconscious. Taken as a whole, the Journals read as a fractured map of reality that incorporates the psychologically fraught operations of looking with the mundane sights and sounds of intercity travel.