Virginia Wagner
Virginia Wagner by Eat the Cake NYC.
Virginia Wagner makes paintings set in zones of conflict between human progress and the natural world. She received her BA from Oberlin College in Studio Art and Creative Writing and her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art’s Hoffberger School of Painting. She was granted the 2016 Lotos Prize in Painting as well as residencies at The Watermill Center, Kaatsbaan, Bridge Street Theater, Mount Tremper Arts, Brush Creek, Byrdcliffe, VCCA, the Edward Albee Foundation, Jentel Foundation, Ucross, Vermont Studio Center, and Yale Norfolk. She is currently working on a new commission for the Guggenheim Works & Process as well as a series of paintings about climate change for permanent exhibition aboard a National Geographic and Lindblad Expedition arctic explorer ship. Wagner lives in Brooklyn, NY and teaches at Pratt Institute.
Can you tell us a bit about the process of making your work?
Boardwalk, 2021. Ink and oil on canvas, 32 x 40 in.
My work centers around the tension between human progress and the natural world. I layer paint as a way to play out this drama in the materials themselves. When I began as a painter, I was drawn to similar imagery – floods, storms, fires, growth, and decay – but because I had trained as a scientific illustrator, I would render each of them meticulously. When I finished, I would have created the likeness of water or smog, but it lacked the energy of that element.
Through experimentation, I began putting the canvas on the ground and actually flooding it with water and ink. The spills couldn’t be controlled. Even when I attempted to direct them, they had a mind of their own and an organic complexity that better spoke to the complexity of the systems I was trying to harness.
My paintings now begin with a series of these spills. I then use oil paint to map the human structures in the piece – the architecture, figures, and perspectival, gridded space. I let these two ways of working play and combat each other to direct the image. Sometimes, if the piece is becoming too rigid, I’ll put the canvas back on the ground, pour another oil spill, and wrestle the image out of that.
Tell us more about your work in the show.
Vinalhaven comes out of the idea of a card house, a structure that offers safety and shelter but is incredibly fragile. The planes are almost without dimension. Spatially, the piece is unstable. Sometime the trees seem to be in front of the sky, while other times the sky is in front of the trees. They flip back and forth. I like to think of this strange geometry as a way of folding together multiple moments in time, allowing the viewer to observe their relationships.
The Museum pictures a flooded museum. We build these secular temples to house our stories and images and assume that they will be preserved indefinitely. But even these spaces are subject to entropy and change. This painting is also a look at the journey of the art object when it becomes unmoored from its originally intended resting place. Where will it travel to in its long life? How will it evolve?
Opening Night, 2021. Ink and oil on canvas, 32 x 40 in.
What are some references you draw upon in your work? Are there any themes in particular that you like to focus on when creating?
My work looks at cycles of construction and destruction. I reference locations where the stakes of this struggle are high: flood zones, areas of fire, and vulnerable shelters. I’ve painted homes that have burned in New Mexico, an empty pool near the Salton Sea, an abandoned hospital complex on Staten Island, bridge underpasses, and temporary shelters in the Louisiana bayou. As Margaret Atwood said of The Handmaid’s Tale, “I made nothing up.” I didn’t have to. We live on a volatile planet that is going through unprecedented transformation at our hands. The paintings show us glimpses of the world around us – stretched into strangeness in the mirror of the canvas.
Who are some of your favorite artists? Or who has been inspirational recently?
The Bard, 2021. Ink and oil on canvas, 62 x 78 in.
I’ve had the privilege of working as an assistant to many of my favorite artists. When I first moved to New York, I supported myself this way. I learned a great deal from each of them about technique, grit, chance, career, and sourcing inspiration. I assisted Wangechi Mutu, Julie Heffernan, Andrew Ondrejcak, Adam Helms, Kyle Staver, and Miriam Cabessa, each of whom influenced my practice.
Most recently, I’ve been feeling a strong artistic kindship to my generation of artists creating across multiple fields and am interested in how we might work together. I feel that the art world has become too specialized, corporate, and demanding of degrees. I’m interested in drawing on the energy of the collective, as the New York art scene did in earlier eras and as people are doing in Berlin, where I worked with the Agora Art Collective. At this moment, I am most inspired by the dancers, filmmakers, writers, musicians, and performance artists who I am honored to call friends.
Do you have any shows coming up? Anything else you would like to share?
I am currently knee-deep in two exciting projects. I’m creating a series of paintings for permanent exhibition aboard a National Geographic and Lindblad Expedition arctic explorer ship. The works depict an ice world, where humans mine and build with ice as their main resource. They offer up a funhouse mirror to climate change, allowing us to contemplate a world in flux and reflect on our insatiable drive to extract resources. The eighteen paintings will span a full deck of the ship. Three of them are featured here.
I am also creating the visuals for a collaborative performance project for Guggenheim Works & Process. This piece is inspired by British artist, filmmaker, writer, and queer activist Derek Jarman and his memoir Chroma, a meditation on the color spectrum written during the AIDS crisis.
Virginia Wagner’s work is included in our show “We Are Still in Eden,” January 7th - Febuary 28th, 2022. Visit her website here or on Instagram @virginiawagner.