"When most people think about concrete, they think about the obvious stuff: The color gray. New York City. Why it's generally a bad idea to jump off tall buildings. When John Wilson thinks about concrete, the erstwhile star of HBO's "How to With John Wilson" thinks about DMX, Hallmark movies, Kim Kardashian, public diarrhea, a trailblazing Asian American judge, the world's first 3D-printed Starbucks, and a 3,100-mile footrace that honors a dead Brooklyn cult leader."
"A sweetly Dantean scavenger who collages this broken existence back together from an endlessly amusing library of first-person video snippets and unpredictable detours (his clips layered with a quizzical voiceover that warps their images into cheeky visual puns, and evokes the affect of an alien kindergartner sending travelogues about life on Earth to its friends back home), Wilson makes sense of the world by sanding the edges off its infinite strangeness."
"His work suggests a sleeping brain that's straining to organize chaos into order, and his ability to manufacture semi-logical associations between literally anything - often by forging a path that leads from A to B to Q to ancient hieroglyphics to an Avatar fan support group before eventually finding its way back to where it began - has allowed him to impose some credible degree of meaning onto a human condition that offers all too little of its own."
John Wilson links disparate cultural details to the single anchor of concrete, uniting celebrities, public incidents, architecture, and strange rituals. He collages first-person video snippets and unpredictable detours, layering clips with a quizzical voiceover that warps images into cheeky visual puns. His narration evokes an alien kindergartner sending travelogues about life on Earth, observing with amused bafflement and strange affection. Wilson’s associative method forges semi-logical paths from A to unexpected points such as ancient hieroglyphics or fan groups, then circles back to the beginning. That method imposes a credible degree of meaning on a human condition that offers little, sustaining work on the tension between order and entropy.
Read at IndieWire
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