User:Jesse.kauppila/sandbox

Catherine Wagner (b.1953) resides in San Francisco, California and is an active international artist. She is also a Professor of Art at Mills College.

Wagner’s photographic projects have generally dealt with the subjects of architecture and objects from the fields of art and science. Wagner has also completed large-scale, site-specific public art comissions for the City of San Francisco, the City of San Jose, the UCSF Medical School, and most recently for the City of Los Angeles.

Critic David Bonetti has described Wagner’s work as an examination of "the systems people create, our love of order, our ambition to shape the world, the value we place on knowledge, and the tokens we display to express ourselves.”

Architecture
Catherine Wagner began her photographic career with “Early California Landscapes,” photographs of the rapid development of California in the mid-seventies. Mark Johnstone characterizes this work as dealing with “Visual motifs, such as a purity of line, form and shape, [that] are exercised with great clarity, and exemplify her long standing fascination with the materials of architecture.”

This work is very much related to the work of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Topographics in its departure from the tradition of landscape photography through an interest in constructed, gritty, urban, often architectural environments, rather than natural, sublime, rural environs. Wagner’s work, in particular, stands in contrast to other photographers of the American West such as Ansel Adams, Carleton E. Watkins, and Timothy O’Sullivan.

Other photographic projects, dealing similarly with the built environment include: “Moscone Center (1978),” “American Classrooms (1986),” “Home and Other Stories (1992), and “Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance (1995)”, and New Orleans World Exposition (1984 – 1985).”

“American Classrooms” consists of photographs of sites of learning and provides a portrait of the United States educational system through photographs of a diverse range of classrooms from a language lab at the Defense Foreign Language Institute to a children’s sand box at the New Mexico School for the Deaf. Of this investigation of systems of creating knowledge Lewis Baltz writes, “Catherine Wagner’s reserved yet richly descriptive photographs oppose the pleasures of seeing with the duty to think about what we see; they both permit and demand our active participation in their understanding.”

“Home and Other Stories,” an exhibition and publication by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is a continuation of Catherine’s investigation of the built environment. In these triptychs Catherine photographed the interior of stranger’s homes. Wagner chose to focus on, “individual shrines, collections, furniture, decoration, and personal artifacts.” In the foreword to the book accompanying this exhibition, Los Angeles County Museum of Art director Michael E. Shapiro writes “The exhibition of 'Home and Other Stories' provides an opportunity to consider how we define ourselves through our choice of things to live with and what role photography can play in the process of personal invention.”

Art and Science
Wagner’s interest in the effects of the influence of architecture on society began to shift towards science first with the project entitled “Art & Science: Investigating Matter.” This body of work focuses on both the working, laboratory environments in which scientific research takes place as well as the materials and instruments native to these environments: fruit flies, chemicals, beakers, test tubes, flasks. These settings all exhibit the improvised, ‘’ad hoc’’ traces of a lived-in, worked-in environment.

This is the case with the typology of twelve photographs of freezers: “-86 Degree Freezer (12 areas of concern and crisis).” These photographs show the raw ingredients of scientific research. The proper names which characterize the titles of the photographs which make up this typology, “Bipolar Disorder”, Alzheimer’s”, “Breast Cancer”, “HIV” contrast with the mundane visual nature of the subject matter: containers in freezers. These photographs were used to create Catherine Wagner’s first public art piece at Comme des Garcons in Kyoto, Japan

“Art and Science (1995)” was followed by a series of projects dealing with art and science in a formally similar manner: “Museum Pieces,” “Cross Sections (2001),” and “Trilogy: Reflections on Frankenstein, the Arctic Circle, and the History of Science (2003).” In this work Wagner photographs the tools and materials used in museums and galleries in the same way that she photographs laboratories and scientific instruments. Indeed, there is a formal similarity in the subject matter she chooses. The wire instruments/supports used to hold artifacts in museum displays in “Ship I” and “Ship II” from the “Museum Pieces” project closely resemble the apparatus in “Pipette Stand” from “Art and Science.”

Wagner further problematizes the relationship of art and science in other aspects of her work. In the project, “Cross Sections” Wagner used medical imaging devices, such as the MRI and SEM, to explore familiar organic materials such as corncobs, pomegranates, shark teeth, and antlers. These photographs were created using the same scientific research techniques. From this project Wagner created an installation, “Pomegranate Wall” and the permanent public art piece at the University of California San Francisco, “Cell Wall II.”

While Wagner’s practice is often an examination of the sober, serious topic of knowledge systems, her work often exhibits traces of humor. In “Art and Science” a photographed flask reads “Definitely not sterile.” A chalkboard in “The American Classroom” is blank except for large words reading “I Don’t Know.”  Wagner has recently expanded upon this playfulness.

In projects such as “Reclassifying History (2005),” “A Narrative History of the Lightbulb (2006),” and “Morphology (2010)” Wagner has visually, often whimsically, rearranged historical narratives through the creation of installations, composition from many different objects.

In “A Narrative History of the Lightbulb,” Wagner not only takes photographs of objects, she arranges the subjects of her photographs. This process “[…] borrows from the rich history of the still life with a keen eye toward Morandi, utiliz[es] similar strategies of grouping familiar objects in beautiful, compelling installations,” Lightbulbs are arranged by color in “Ode to Yves” and “Green Energy;” by technology in “ Early Tungsten” and “Carbon Filaments 1900 -1910;” and by era in “The Lamps of 1900” and “The 1890s.”

Differing organizing, even playful, principles are similarly utilized in “Reclassifying History” in which pristine, designer chairs from the collection of the de Young Museum are arranged helter-kelter.

Wagner pursued a similar project as an artist in residence at the California Academy of the Sciences where she constructed large photographic panels depicting the plants and insects that would have inhabited San Francisco 300 million years ago. Wagner digitally arranged hundreds of her photos of these specimens based on local wind patterns. Of this work Hearne Pardee wrote, “Wagner elevates sensory pleasure to an aesthetic plane by insisting on the work of nature in itself, setting the stage for an old-fashioned sense of wonder.”

Public Art
Wagner’s public art began with the commission of “-86 Degree Freezers (12 areas of concern and crisis)” was used to create the interior cladding of “Commes de Garsons” in Kyoto, Japan.

All of Wagner’s public artwork is site-specific and relates to the cultural, history, or geography of the setting for which it is intended. Much of her public artwork consists of the translation of photographic work into large exterior or interior spaces. Catherine Wagner also works extensively in coordination with the architects designing whatever space she is working on. “Cell Wall II,” depicting cells dividing, was created for the University of California San Francisco’s Medical School to enliven a courtyard. “Swimmer’s Waves,” depicting light reflected and amplified by wakes of waves created by swimmers, was created for Sava Pool designed by Mark Cavagnero.

For the new civic auditorium in downtown LA, Wagner created “Ghost Grove” a work inspired by her encounter with a small citrus tree in “Little Tokyo.” It was the last vestige of the once flourishing citrus groves in downtown LA. Along the interior walls of the auditorium Wagner photographically etched anodized aluminum with images of an orange grove. This frieze shines through the building’s glass exterior creating a visual presence in the urban city center.

Currently Wagner is creating public art for the Moscone Station of San Francisco’s new Central Subway. Wagner is using photographs from her series “Moscone Center” which documents the construction of Moscone Center, a landmark event in the urban development of San Francisco which shifted the center of the city. Wagner writes that with this project she was working with the idea of “future ruins, or archaeology in reverse, investigating construction as process and as a metaphor for change” David Johnstone writes of this work, “The images evoke a range of responses, from serene meditation to analytical observation, and mark the shifting articstic, political, social, and economic values represented by the construction on this piece of real estate.”

The “Moscone Center” photographs are being incorporated into the concourse and headhouse of the Moscone Station of the new San Francisco Central Subway. These photographs will be laser etched onto grey granite, incorporated into the architecture of the location at the location of their creation.

Awards and Collections
Wagner has received many major awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, NEA Fellowships, an award from Artadia: The Fund for Art and Dialogue, the Ferguson Award, and a Fellowship at the San Jose Museum of Art. Ms. Wagner was also named one of Time Magazine’s Fine Arts Innovators of the Year in 2001.

Her work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Folkswang, Essen, Germany; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Her monographs include Cross Sections (Twin Palms Press 2002), Art & Science: Investigating Matter (Washington University, 1996), Home and Other Stories (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1993), and American Classroom (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1988). Ms. Wagner is represented by Gallery Luisotti in Santa Monica, California and the Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco.