IN THE OJAC CELLS SERIES OF EXHIBITIONS
The subjects of Willie Binnie’s paintings and objects are familiar to us and often unremarkable. Yet the manner in which the artist depicts them makes the mundane mysterious, encouraging us to re-evaluate them while engaging our curiosity. In short, Binnie has a knack for making the familiar, unfamiliar. Using a limited or monochromatic palette and source images derived from films, photography, and historical imagery, he provides an enigmatic narrative simply by isolating a single object in his compositions—a fully-suited astronaut lounges in a lawn chair, an entrance to a brutalist-style bank facade beckons us, a depiction of a snowman innocently smiles back at us.
For his Cell Series exhibition, Binnie constructs a life size wishing well in one gallery—standing in stark contrast to the prison cells that likely heard a fair share of wishes and regrets. Within the other cell gallery, a series of his signature black and white paintings depict “objects of desire” that a past inmate might wish for—a plate of enchiladas, the palm trees near a beach, and other objects we routinely take for granted in our lives.
Willie Binnie was born in Dallas, TX in 1985, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and Williamstown, MA. He has had solo exhibitions at Keijers Koning, Dallas; LMAKgallery, NY; Paul Loya Gallery, LA; Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, WA; as well as participated in numerous group exhibitions at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA; Wilding Crane Gallery, LA; HVW8 Gallery, LA; the Rachofsky House, Dallas; The Public Trust, Dallas; Dallas Contemporary, Dallas.
Generously sponsored by The Charles E. Jacobs Foundation, McGinnis Family Fund of Communities Foundation of Texas, and Dr. Larry Wolz
WILLIE BINNIE, Black Sun (Pink), 2024, black gesso and acrylic stain on canvas, 87 × 87 inches, Courtesy of the artist and Keijsers Koning Gallery, Dallas, TX.
Patrick Kelly, OJAC Director and Curator, interview with artist Willie Binnie (May 2026)
PK: I often begin by asking artists to reveal some background information—where you grew up, went to school, or early events that may have impacted your work. The question seems innocuous but it can be revealing and interesting to readers.
WB: I was born and raised in Dallas. While my upbringing and schooling weren’t especially artistic in nature, my family always encouraged my interests and a handful of formative experiences had an outsized impact. My first “commission” was drawing the cover of the all-school Christmas pageant program when I was in kindergarten and I recall being perplexed that my art teacher asked me to do it all. I guess Ms. Wilder saw something I didn’t yet. Another big one was that my godmother lived in NYC and so my mom would put my siblings and me on a plane (when you could still walk us through security) and we’d spend a week going around the city—to museums, galleries, performances. I didn’t register it at the time but it showed me that art was something that people did; not just as a hobby but really made a life of it. I had always been artistic but being an artist never seemed like a realistic life path. When I was in high school another very important teacher, Susan Sanders, encouraged me to take painting more seriously and suggested I go to a semester-long program at the now-closed Oxbow School in Napa, CA. This experience changed my life. It made me recognize that I wasn’t just artistic but was, in fact, an artist. That it wasn’t really a choice; I just was.
PK: Has that initial vision of what it is to be an artist changed over the years?
WB: Ha, yes. Another teacher who was very important to me is Sandeep Mukherjee, recently-retired painting professor at Pomona College, in Southern California. I ended up being his studio assistant during my undergrad years and I learned a great deal about managing a studio, developing a sustainable practice, practical matters like shipping and storage, and that having a day-job is probably a good idea. I remember in my sophomore oil painting class—the first I had ever taken—Sandeep said to us, “You know, being an artist isn’t just pleasure painting and fabulous cocktail parties; it can be a very lonely existence… but of course there are plenty of fabulous cocktail parties, too.” I think of it often and paraphrase it to my own students now—that, while the actual making component of one’s practice is obviously paramount, there’s a fair amount of unromantic administrative aspects of it as well. But I also often half-joke to students that being an artist isn’t so much a profession in the traditional sense, in that you just have something inside that compels you to make things, often against all reason, sound financial planning, and sensible time management.
PKQ: I think we could do a whole interview about the life of being an artist and how they have to navigate the “real” world—the good, the bad, and the ugly of it. But, let’s talk about your work. You often choose the “mundane” or “ordinary” as imagery. I don’t mean this in a negative way; it’s an effective approach, one that employs very simple objects and scenes to make engaging works. Can you discuss a few of the recurring image sources and how they are significant to you, like a snowman or astronaut?
WB: I am a painter driven by images. How images construct meaning, and have meaning projected upon them, I see as the central arch of my work. On the one hand, my work centers on terrain—on the land and the built environment, on physical traces of human activity, and on aspirations and memories projected onto landscapes. Many of my works focus on images of the land as a site, as skin, and as a repository of meanings. But on the other hand, my work also centers on seemingly mundane objects or motifs that I feel allude to or serve as symbolic surrogates for larger historical narratives of the nation. Flags, the moon, astronauts, snowmen, soccer fields, domestic bank architecture—to name a few recurring motifs over the past few years—serve as visual markers that underpin much larger and less visually approachable notions of sovereignty, power, nationalism, border politics, war, death, etc. I filter through and distill a pictorial language from the world around me, often from my daily experiences (in fact, all of the paintings in this show are based on photos I have taken with my phone over the past year-and-a-half). So, while we are all constantly bombarded with an endless deluge of images every waking moment of our lives, sometimes a few just stick out to me as representative of something bigger, something I'd like to say, or at least approach. But I'd say that even through seemingly innocuous or quotidian objects, like a decrepit vinyl lawn chair or common commercial ice chest, I continually return to the subject of territory, in one way or another, and its physical and symbolic demarcations.
PK: The subjects of some of the paintings you intend to install in the larger of the two jail cells (two physical demarcations for sure) also include an electrical breaker box, an enchilada plate dinner, and a few others you’ve mentioned. Viewed together, with like size and limited palette, do you see them working as some sort of variable syntax—where the viewer detects an implied meaning of one work that may change when read in context with the others?
WB: It took me too long to accept that I was never going to be able to say everything I wanted to say in a single painting, or even single exhibition. I could never distill all of my beliefs, politics, convictions, ideas into one fantasy masterwork. If I somehow do, I’d have no need to paint anymore.
I think of each painting as a quiet vignette–an "anecdotal aphoristic fragment" as artist Michael Corris once pithily observed–while creating an overall mood or psychology in the space by the simple collision of one image next to or across from another. I think we're naturally hardwired to construct narrative, to try to make an overall sense of things. Here, I'm not necessarily trying to create a complete sentence, but brief phrases, impressions from very different landscapes. So, yes, you are exactly right in that, while there is no correct or incorrect way of reading the images as a group, what interests me is that syntax, how the meaning of one can subtly connect and also shift in relation to another. As for the uniform size, which is a highly unusual approach for me, I really felt it was important, given the setting, to reflect the rhythm of the cell windows, to mirror that order to the space.
PK: In addition, you are constructing an actual “wishing” well in the other cell. Can you talk a little about that decision?
WB: When you invited me to be part of the Cell Series, I kept dwelling on what it meant to create work for and show in a space with such weight imbued in it. It didn't seem appropriate to just approach it as an art gallery given its history. I started imagining what it would be like to be in there for its original purpose. The vision of a solemn well kept coming back to me as a quiet and surreal object to see in a place that is designed to keep people confined.
There is a Bill Callahan lyric that goes, "Everybody has their own thing that they yell into a well." I've been thinking about the well as a repository for private thoughts, where a participant can have a personal moment to say whatever they wish to say into a void that, for all intents and purposes, is a bottomless hole, or tunnel, albeit a simple and ancient device for obtaining water.
So I was drawn to the simplicity of the gesture: an unadorned sculptural installation—small round well—constructed of the same material that much of the jailhouse is, imagining being in a cell with nothing but time and your own thoughts. But also, as an imaginary portal between any other place but a jail cell.
PK: That’s a poignant reply. It also makes me think of an artist’s creative process, pouring their own private thoughts into a well and creating a portal.
WB: Thank you. That rings true to me.
