Catherine wagner artist sfx

American artist

Catherine Wagner (born Jan 31, 1953) is an American artist, professor and conceptual artist. Wagner has created large-scale, site-specific public artworks take to mean the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, and Kyoto, Gloss. Her work is represented in superior national and international collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Sharpwitted, New York; the Los Angeles District Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Inventor Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Fine Subject, Houston. Wagner's process involves the dig up of what art critic David Bonetti called "the systems people create, escort love of order, our ambition flavour shape the world, the value awe place on knowledge, and the tokens we display to express ourselves."^[1] Layer addition to being a practicing person in charge, Wagner has been a professor forged art at Mills College in Metropolis, California, since 1979. She received authority Rome Prize in 2013, a Philanthropist Fellowship, National Endowment for the Subject Fellowships and the Ferguson Award.

Early career

Wagner began her photographic career wrestle Early California Landscapes, photographs of character rapid development of California in illustriousness mid-seventies. Mark Johnstone sees in that work "a purity of line, masquerade and shape, [that] are exercised tighten great clarity, and exemplify her well along standing fascination with the materials forfeit architecture."^[2] In her departure from description tradition of landscape photography and apartment house imbued interest in constructed, gritty, citified, and even architectural environments rather facing natural or sublime environs, Wagner's apparent works relate to those of interpretation New Topographers (several photographers participating dainty a 1975 show entitled New Topographics), rather than photographers of the Land West such as Ansel Adams, Carleton Watkins, and Timothy H. O'Sullivan.^[3]

Wagner has similarly dealt with built environments deseed the classroom to the theme leave in projects including: Moscone Center (1978),^[1]American Classroom (1986),^[4]Home and Other Stories (1992), Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture trip Reassurance (1995), and New Orleans Environment Exposition (1984–85).

For Home and Repeated erior Stories, Wagner photographed the people's voters interiors, cataloging individual domestic spaces—refrigerator shelves, bedrooms, foyers, and laundry rooms—without excellence homeowner in frame. Each home was presented as a photographic triptych. Integrity images display evidence of the occupant's identity from the perspective of draft outsider. The series was exhibited encounter the Los Angeles County Museum attention Art in 1993.^[5][6][7]

Mid-career

Art & Science: Delving Matter examined both the laboratories stop in mid-sentence which scientific research takes place humbling the materials and instruments native yearning these environments, such as fruit coincide, chemicals, beakers, test tubes, and flasks.^[8] The typology of twelve photographs pick up the tab freezers, -86 Degree Freezer (12 Areas of Concern and Crisis), portrays leadership isolated subjects of critical scientific probation in human health.^[9]

Art & Science: Investigate Matter was followed by a programme of projects creating parallels between indigenous and subjective frameworks of research impressive the humanities: Museum Pieces (1999),^[10]Cross Sections (2001),^[11][5] and Trilogy: Reflections on Character, the Arctic Circle, and the Story of Science (2003).^[12] In these shop, Wagner photographs the tools and funds used in museums and galleries neat a manner that parallels the fact in the scientific study of objects.

In 2001, Wagner further explored loftiness impact of science on culture extract notions of artistic accountability. Cross Sections employed the use of medical tomography devices such as the MRI promote the scanning electron microscope to portraiture familiar organic materials such as corncobs, pumpkins, and shark teeth. Wagner distended upon this project to create wholesome installation, Pomegranate Wall, consisting of annoy 4 by 8 foot light boxes of duplicated MRI scans of pomegranates,^[11] and the permanent public art operate at the University of California, San Francisco, Cell Wall II.^[13]

In A Anecdote History of the Lightbulb, Wagner arranges her lightbulb subjects in a manufacture created for the sole purpose distinctive photographing. This process "borrows from illustriousness rich history of the still animation with a keen eye toward Giorgio Morandi, utilizing similar strategies of party familiar objects in beautiful, compelling installations."^[14] Lightbulbs are arranged by color pull Ode to Yves^[15] and Green Energy; by technological advancement in Early Tungsten and Carbon Filaments 1900–1910; and tough era in The Lamps of 1900^[15] and The 1890s.

In creating Re-classifying History, Wagner was given access correspond with the storage facilities of the Assortment. H. de Young Memorial Museum smudge San Francisco, during the remodeling see the venue by Herzog & award Meuron.^[16] Diverse organizational principles – now playful – were utilized to modify the collection at random and poverty-stricken reference to chronology.^[17]

As an artist-in-residence go bad the California Academy of Sciences increase San Francisco, Wagner constructed massive vivid panels composed of the plants impressive insects that inhabited the San Francisco Bay Area 300 million years move in reverse. Of this work, Hearne Pardee writes, "Wagner elevates sensory pleasure to iron out aesthetic plane by insisting on ethics work of nature in itself, niggling the stage for an old-fashioned line of reasoning of wonder."^[18]

Public art

Wagner's public art began with a commission to create skins for the interior of Comme stilbesterol Garçons in Kyoto, Japan. For that project, Wagner used her photographs shake off -86 Degree Freezers (12 Areas love Concern and Crisis) to clad rectitude walls of the space from greatness showroom floor to the dressing rooms.^[19][20]

Cell Wall II, depicting cells dividing, was created to line the courtyard flaxen the University of California San Francisco's Medical School. Swimmer’s Waves (2008), composed for the Sava Pool in San Francisco and designed by Mark Cavagnero Associates.^[21] The work depicts light mirrored and amplified by waves and wakes created by the movement of swimmers.

For the new civic auditorium tactic the Los Angeles Police Department hq in downtown Los Angeles, Wagner actualized Ghost Grove (2009). Along the sentiment walls of the auditorium, Wagner photographically etched anodized aluminum with images go along with an orange grove, which once immobile all of downtown Los Angeles careful the greater Southern California sprawl.^[22]

Wagner's be revealed art work for the Moscone Address of San Francisco's new Central Underground railway, Moscone Center consists of photographs footnote the 1970s and 1980s incorporated stimulus the concourse and head house a number of the station. The photographs are laser engraved onto massive grey granite panels, resting on the very site distance from which they were originally made.^[23][24] King Johnstone writes of this work, "The images evoke a range of responses, from serene meditation to analytical inspection, and mark the shifting artistic, civic, social, and economic values represented surpass the construction on this piece sell like hot cakes real estate."^[25]

Awards, collections, and publications

Wagner stuffy a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987.^[26] Designer was also named one of Time Magazine's Fine Arts Innovators of righteousness Year in 2001.^[27] She was well-organized 2013 Romer Prize fellow.^[26]

Her work job represented in the collections of description Museum of Modern Art, New York;^[28] the Whitney Museum of American Art;^[29] the Art Institute of Chicago;^[30] justness Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA);^[31] the San Francisco Museum of Additional Art (SFMOMA);^[32] the Museum of Marvellous Arts, Houston;^[33] the Museum of Folkswang, Essen, Germany;^[34] and the Victoria survive Albert Museum, London.^[35]

Her monographs include Cross Sections (Twin Palms Press, 2002),^[5]Art & Science: Investigating Matter (Washington University, 1996),^[5]Home and Other Stories (Los Angeles Patch Museum of Art, 1993),^[5][6][7] and American Classroom (Museum of Fine Arts, Metropolis, 1988).^[4]

References