Engage Projects is thrilled to announce This Is Text Based Art, a solo show by Adam Daley Wilson.

The gallery walls will be covered in towering large-format oil paintings that use semiotic concepts as a means of exploring ideas about the meaning of objective and subjective human theories, from evolution to psychiatry to social justice. ​ An artist, attorney, and mental health advocate, Daley Wilson makes work that is marked by unusual and unique connections between things and ideas impacting our human species and beyond. Ranging from precise oil-painted texts to scrawling oil stick text-abstractions, Daley Wilson experiments with a high-contrast aesthetic to examine gray areas of accountability, ethics, and morality. His works can be separated into two categories of text-based art: personal writing system works that, in addition to their narratives, explore the lines between abstraction and language, and formal works that take linear or geometric approaches to text-based art. In all of them, the artist attempts to "connect ideas and concepts that are usually separated by conventional boundaries in our prevailing methods of thinking."

Daley Wilson’s work is informed by, but not about, his diagnosis of bipolar 1. With it, he investigates questions of normalcy, abnormalcy, and our collective mental state in our global humanity, asking for example, what would be the diagnosis of our species if we applied mental illness criteria to ourselves as a whole? His painting Species Anosodiaphoria (2023) does just that, exploring whether we are aware of our accountability, and, if so, whether we are willing to act consistent with our professed universal codes that manifest across religions and societies around the globe.

Punctuating his show with two in-color pieces, It Appears We Are (2021) and All The Pretty Pictures Make Me Nothing Without You (2022) bring soft blues to the table with their waterscape photographs. The paintings are split down the middle where water meets sky, sewn together by the hand-painted font straddling the horizon. The ambiguous, allcaps statements speak of intimate relationships and universal truths, doing what Daley Wilson does best by making statements that are both expansive and pointed.

A self-taught artist, Daley Wilson’s art can be found in private and corporate collections nationally and internationally, including New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Miami, among others. Daley Wilson has previously served on the Board of Trustees of IDSVA, a leading PhD program with international residencies in art theory and philosophy for visual artists and creative scholars. He currently serves on the Board of a non-proft that supports US teens working to end mental illness stigma.