Victoria Wagner | Everglow
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.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
EVERGLOW
New Works by Victoria Wagner
Artist’s salvaged redwood sculptures are tinged by Northern California fires
ON VIEW : September 1 - October 15, 2020
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 10:30am-5:30pm
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., September 1, 2020—Maybaum Gallery is pleased to present its first solo show with Victoria Wagner. Everglow is a selection of the artist’s mixed media wood sculptures and paintings made with 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. Everglow runs from September 1 through October 15 and is open by appointment with strict social distancing measures in place.
Wagner began working with redwood in 2011 after she was struck by a piece of tree in the garden of her Sonoma home on the famous stretch of redwood grove along the Bohemian Highway. She began to fuse her pursuit of complex precision gradients with her woodworking knowledge, but it’s been in the past four years that working with local redwood has taken on a significantly new meaning with the devastating fires that have ravaged California. Wagner explains:
We used to feel like we lived in a temperate rainforest, now we’re not so sure. The fires bring the ills of climate change right to our door, but they also highlight the human spirit in the face of tragedy and the way our community has remade itself in the aftermath of the Tubbs fire. That’s the everglow, when life finds a way, both human life and natural life, to move forward.
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 sealed with shellac. For Wagner the subject matter becomes the medium and it carries a complicated message: caution and warning, beauty and resilience.
About the Artist
Victoria Wagner is an artist based in the North Bay Area. Her studio is located in Santa Rosa in a building formerly inhabited by a military boys school and Air Force training facility and her woodshop is in a small shed at her home within the forests of Occidental. She has exhibited at Bedford Gallery at the Lesher Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, theLab, Headlands Center for the Arts, Don Soker Contemporary Art, Andrea Schwartz Gallery in San Francisco, Blankspace Gallery in Oakland, Sonoma County Museum, DiRosa Art and Nature Preserve, Brewery Project in Los Angeles and Dose Projects in Brooklyn, New York. She is a senior adjunct lecturer at California College of the Arts.
About the Gallery
Maybaum Gallery was founded in San Francisco in 2018 by Christina Maybaum. The gallery represents emerging and mid career artists with a focus on process driven work that reveals the artist's hand. Located in downtown San Francisco, the gallery comprises 2,000 square feet of exhibition space for solo shows as well as additional viewing space for our growing roster of artists. In addition to rotating exhibitions, the gallery provides private art consulting services to meet clients' unique art needs.
