Remixed
Ben and Oscar Wilson’s exhibition celebrates 20 years of their design studio, Wilson Brothers (image: Richard Oxford).
“We really try and start every project new, and inject a little bit of ourselves into it,” says Ben Wilson, who co-founded the studio Wilson Brothers with his brother Oscar 20 years ago. “It's a bit like if you call someone to remix a record – you want a bit of them.”
Music has played a key role in the brothers’ lives and work. “In the clubs and parties, you meet all sorts of different people,” Oscar says, reflecting on how they built connections that led to creative opportunities for their practice. “Everyone dances together.” To celebrate the studio’s anniversary, the pair have put on an exhibition at Drop City, which includes a new sound system tailor-made to fit snugly into the space’s Victorian train arches.
Both speaker units are made from green painted mild steel that harks back to wartime PA systems, and have horn sections shaped like puckered mouths lined with neon. “They’re a sound system, but they’re also a piece of furniture which can move around the space,” Ben says, explaining that the systems were commissioned by the venue and can be placed back to back to divide the space into two different rooms that can be rented out for sample sales, exhibitions or events. “They’ve got a real function beyond just their sound,” he says, gesturing to a ledge above the bass port of the system which acts as a bench.
Ben (left) and Oscar (right), with their new sound system that is tailor-made to fit inside Drop City’s Victorian train arches (image: Richard Oxford).
The space is filled with a reusable cardboard display with panels of images of the brothers’ previous projects, including their first ever retail installation, NikeLab 1948, which featured a neon compass on the ceiling and modular displays inspired by stadium seating, and a recent design of Gilles Peterson’s studio, which is printed at almost 1:1 scale. “There’s an ephemeral nature to some of our projects, like the pop-ups,” Oscar says, “so we thought it would be nice to display some of those life size.” The inside panels are printed with a series of photographs that pull back the curtain on their practice, with early design sketches collaged alongside pictures of friends hugging a bird-like sculpture that formed part of the design of Supreme’s London store, and a selfie of the brothers having a day out at Venice beach. All the photographs are jumbled together without any captions or timelines, creating a bank of inspiration and memories that offers an intimate glimpse into the brothers’ creative process.
The outer panels of the display featured images of the Wilson Brothers’ finished projects, while the inner panels showed behind the scenes pictures of their practice (image: Richard Oxford).
The exhibition also showcases the brothers’ differing expertise. Ben studied product design, and the display features images of his early projects such as Donky Bike, which mixes the strength of BMX bikes with the charm of Dutch bicycle baskets, with a steel beam running through its centre that balances goods on either end. Oscar, meanwhile, studied print making, and his signature hand-drawn lettering is displayed through images of his cover design for Gil Scott-Heron’s memoir The Last Holiday, which he illustrated with a typographic portrait of Heron. “Our childhood was very much based around our interest in skateboarding and BMX and early hip hop and graffiti and sampling culture, and all of those genres being very DIY,” Oscar explains, influences that can clearly be seen in Ben’s many takes on the bike, including a monowheel and a pedal-powered vehicle shaped like a children’s toy car, and Oscar’s graffiti-like lettering.
The Wilson brothers sitting on top of An Appointment to Listen, a sound system made for Imprint Works decorated with 2,500 record labels from their personal collection (image: Madison McLoughlin).
More than all the family photographs on display, the project that most evokes their shared childhood is An Appointment to Listen, a sound system for Imprint Works decorated with 2,500 record labels from their personal collection that were printed onto small stickers and stuck onto the system like tiles. “[The project] was really about growing up listening to pirate radio and being too young to go and buy records or to go to the parties the DJs were talking about, but taking notes of what they were playing,” Oscar says, explaining that the title of the piece refers to the experience of faithfully listening to their favourite radio DJs every week. “Each record was individually photographed, and only maniacs would do that in this day and age,” Ben adds. “But for us, it was therapeutic to stick each one on – it felt like placing stickers on skateboards when we were young.”
Words Helen Gonzalez Brown