Crystal Wagner: Wonder and Curiosity
While on the one hand we live in a world where we frequently see natural resources taken for granted, it also pushes for some more conscientious individuals to advocate for change, or at least to consider change. Enter multidisciplinary artist Crystal Wagner.
“I want people to feel a sense of wonder and curiosity,” says Wagner. “The kind of wonder that is provocative enough to get people to look up from their devices and consider their current relationship with the world they live in. We’re starting to lose ourselves in the 21st century in what I consider technological glaucoma: tunnel vision that eliminates the physical periphery. Experiences that remind us of our bodies, of the spaces we travel through, are becoming more rare,” she says.
Wagner is an installation artist who not only produces large-scale galaxy-like structures that seem to engulf the spaces they inhabit, but also produces prints and sculptures, that are all equally enigmatic, colourful and begin with a drawing. “I use drawing as a way to understand the way I see. It gives me an idea of what my visual language is and helps me hone in on my aesthetic sensibilities. I think drawing is honest that way. Nothing communicates more clearly the language of an artist then what happens when things are stripped down to simple mark-making,” she adds.
Communication and honesty are two themes that frequently encompass her work’s intentions, as well as our dichotomous relationship with the natural and manmade worlds. Her most recent works, two pieces that she is currently working on explore the disconnection of human beings from the natural world. “The works are both manufactured and natural and explore our relationships with concepts related to mass production, consumer culture, synthetic and artificial experiences, technology and nature,” she explains.
She is also interested in investigating people’s relationships with things that are consistently being classified as exotic based off of our lack of contact with them through her immersive installation works as well as the smaller sculptural works. “Forms and structures from the natural world become more and more alien to us as we are more submerged in our modern landscapes,” she says. Through her installation pieces she wants to evoke a sense of wonder that reminds people to do something that seems to have been forgotten: looking up. Her body of work that includes pieces like Synaesthesia a massive sinuous installation at California’s Hashimoto Gallery fulfil her objective. Synaesthesia engulfs the front corner of the gallery, flowing above the doorway, and looming above the entrance. You can’t help but look up. “I want to evoke a sense of wonder that reminds people to look up and be physically engaged in the world we live in,” she says. “But I also want to provoke people to consider their current relationship with materials, objects and experiences that they surround themselves with. As we surround ourselves with more things plastic, more things produced, more things manufactured; our relationship outside of those cultivated spaces is becoming more foreign,” she says.
Like most of her other sculptures and installations, Synaesthesia is made entirely from paper, with each piece painstakingly cut and crafted, and pieced together. In fact, all of her installation works are site-specific. In world building, space is the substrate – it’s where all of the decisions are made. It usually takes her about 15 minutes to decided how she is going to use the space after she gets on location and then it’s “full force art on steroids. I usually work for 10-14 days 12 to 18 hours a day until the piece is done.” Such is the timeframe of paper. But paper, she explains is easy to manipulate, providing her with the multidimensional requirements for her pieces, but she has always been interested in the raw potential in materials. “Throughout college, I made an effort to learn as much as I possibly could about what it meant to make things. Technically honing my craft with clay, wood, wire, paint, printmaking,” she says. “I don’t want to isolate myself to one particular mode of making. With that said, I have always considered things three dimensionally, even when working flat. So when I was focusing on printmaking in graduate school, it only seemed natural for me to consider paper as having the same dimensional capabilities. It has two surfaces and an edge that gives me a wide range of possibilities when it comes to manipulating it.”
Wagner also has an ethos of recycling and reusing the materials that she works with, testing and experimenting with them, discovering their potentially hidden capabilities. “As an advocate for reusing/recycling, I want to see how many incarnations the material I have can become,” she says adding that she will even have the tablecloth that she uses at installations, gathered and shipped back to her after every piece. “Essentially, it’s like scraping the paint off of a canvas and reusing it. This is fascinating and terrifying to me.”
“It’s a fascinating example of the lifespan of manufactured materials that were made with the intention of being disposable, which is a reminder of the wastefulness of our consumer culture on one level and an exploitation of the strange relationship with one-time-use products that we currently have as a society,” she says.
The work of Crystal Wagner will be on show at Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco for her second solo show in the space. Titled Microcosm, the exhibit will be comprised of new and recent cut paper sculptures. Opening today pieces will be on view until Saturday 23 July 2016. Microcosm will also coincide with Wagner’s site-specific installation at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, which will be on view until Sunday 28 August 2016.
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