Victoria Wagner’s abstract compositions inhabit perpetual space, vibrational color relationships and craft. Of this, she blames her formative years spent in the high Nevada desert in a reservation town where light was sharp and dramatic, the mountains governed the atmosphere and the sky commanded more peripheral vision than one is capable of perceiving. Conceptually, her research combines historical and contemporary pursuits of knowledge that run the gamut from interplanetary exploration to spiritual transcendence and has found great inspiration in the writings of cosmonauts, indigenous memoirists, industrial designers, mystics, arborists, social anthropologists and archaeologists.
Everglow is a selection of the artist’s mixed media wood sculptures and paintings made with repurposed and sometimes scorched redwood from the recent Northern California wildfires. Wagner’s work melds saturated jewel-toned color spectrums, geometric constellations and pieces of salvaged redwood to create gem-like meditations on climate change, the California wildfires that continue to rage for the fourth year in a row and the resiliency of the communities that come together to help each other in the face of disaster.
Conceptually, Victoria Wagner’s work explores the environment, climate collapse, and the role of beauty in art and human perception. Formally, the work offers a visual spectacle through the use of tonal vibration, materiality, rhythm, form and color. Sourcing damaged redwood trees from a local arborist in West Sonoma County where she lives amidst a redwood forest, Wagner carves raw chunks of tree into faceted gemstone shaped orbs. The contours of her shapes are often determined by the damage to the tree itself; she slowly shaves the charred weak spots in an intuitive process that she says highlights the “sentience of the redwood tree.” The newly formed planes are then enhanced with the artist’s signature color fields of vibrant oil paint from natural pigments and then sealed with shellac. For Wagner the subject matter becomes the medium and it carries a complicated message: caution and warning, beauty and resilience.
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