Keith Wilson is an American self-taught photographer. Wilson earned a place as a Finalist in the 3rd Edition of the Boynes Emerging Artist Award.

Who are you?

I am a poet (currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford) as well as a game designer, and have a book (Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon)). I have been incorporating more and more visuals into my work, and photography has allowed me to examine the world in a way I am already doing in my writing with the potential of doing that work without having to find the language for it. Now is a time of loss, even of language.

What inspired you to start creating art?

I don't remember ever not making it. I used to make greeting cards and board games and poems and all kinds of things. I was always interested in creating things, and in taking them apart. Photography is new; I started it a couple years ago to document some of the places I've been lucky enough to go as a poet.

What inspires your work now?

I think I am driven, maybe, more than inspired. By the tightening of the world around the very people who labor to keep it alive. Directly: I am interested in anti-racist, anti-imperialst work, and I'm interested in finding wonder, still.

What mediums do you work in and experiment with?

I'm primarily a poet, but my recent work has dealt with diagrams and drawings. I'm interested in semiotics--in what a genre or a form says, and in what affordances come with a particular expression. Besides joining poetry with images, I do game design work, which in some ways is similar to the poetry, and I take photographs. I love genre-bending, and hybridity. I am interested in multiple truths coexisting in a space simultaneously, even when they are conflicting or conflicted, so I am always interested in taking anything I do and remixing it into something new that can get at sometimes paradoxical notions of identity and meaning.

Are there any particular brands of art supplies you prefer using (if so why)?

I primarily use Adobe software and Canon products, but in both cases it is less about any actual preference or allegiance than it is about the availability of resources to teach myself how to use them. I actually learned a lot of what I know about photography from using a program called Paintshop Pro, and in many ways I prefer the more than a decade old technology. But there just isn't very much out there for it anymore!

Do you have any particular ways that you work through a creative block?

I was told very early on, by my first teacher of poetry, and my mentor, Frank X Walker, that there was no such thing as writer's block. By which I think he means (or at least I believe) that the work is the work. I just keep working. Not everything I create will be something I want to share, but I am working through my thoughts and emotions by doing it. Something will come.

Can you give any piece of advice to your fellow artists?

I think people both know that art has no rules, not really, but also have a hard time actually practicing that. I always want to tell people that if you consistently get negative feedback about something in your work, that might be a thing worth keeping--there is a way to make it work, and maybe your initial insistence of doing it is a sign.

How do you manage the need for perfection within your work?

I don't. Maybe one of the hardest things about being an artist for me is never really being happy with anything, but I also recognize that I have to let go of something if I want to begin my next thought.

How do you process/come to terms with and even use other people's opinion of your work?

I am always very interested in what people initially think my work is "about." For me, anything I have to say has to consider what people will likely experience from it, so I can either lean into that experience or subvert it. So for me, getting some sense of what people think--showing or sharing my work in public--is a part of the process of creating it.

Is there an artist/s who inspires you creatively?

Claudia Rankine. She works with photographs as well, and there's a way that her existence in the world, even outside of how profoundly moved I am by her work, has made space for me to try things that there haven't always seemed to have a name.

To view more of Keith Wilson’s work

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