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Throughout her 30-year career, Bay Area artist Catherine Wagner has trained her lens on subjects ranging from the cross-sections of cells and vegetables to Disney theme parks to vintage chairs (the subject of 2005’s “Re-Classifying History” series at the de Young). But it was during the past two years, while she was in residence at the Baltimore Museum of Industry, that Wagner stumbled upon a subject that, in her own words, “I could sink my teeth into.” You could say a lightbulb went off in Wagner’s head—50,000 of them, to be exact. The museum’s extensive collection of vintage bulbs is the focus of Wagner’s latest series, “A Narrative History of the Light Bulb,” on display this month at Stephen Wirtz Gallery.
Working with an 8-by-10-inch view camera, Wagner set up family-portrait-style groupings of the bulbs, arranging them by color, transparency and time period. The results are amazingly diverse, from a stage wink at art history (a blue-hue-perfect homage to Yves Klein) to the architectural metaphor found in the varying shapes and sizes of Utopia. Her Green Energy, a forest-like configuration of painted green bulbs evoking energy conservation, is a nice segue into her next project: an artist-in-residence stint at the California Academy of Sciences’ new all-green building, during which she’ll explore the topic of global warming. “My work is always dealing with contemporary culture,” Wagner says. “But it’s not work that bangs you over the head with a picket sign. Whatever it is I’m working with, there’s always these quiet metaphors.”
Throughout her 30-year career, Bay Area artist Catherine Wagner has trained her lens on subjects ranging from the cross-sections of cells and vegetables to Disney theme parks to vintage chairs (the subject of 2005’s “Re-Classifying History” series at the de Young). But it was during the past two years, while she was in residence at the Baltimore Museum of Industry, that Wagner stumbled upon a subject that, in her own words, “I could sink my teeth into.” You could say a lightbulb went off in Wagner’s head—50,000 of them, to be exact. The museum’s extensive collection of vintage bulbs is the focus of Wagner’s latest series, “A Narrative History of the Light Bulb,” on display this month at Stephen Wirtz Gallery.
Working with an 8-by-10-inch view camera, Wagner set up family-portrait-style groupings of the bulbs, arranging them by color, transparency and time period. The results are amazingly diverse, from a stage wink at art history (a blue-hue-perfect homage to Yves Klein) to the architectural metaphor found in the varying shapes and sizes of Utopia. Her Green Energy, a forest-like configuration of painted green bulbs evoking energy conservation, is a nice segue into her next project: an artist-in-residence stint at the California Academy of Sciences’ new all-green building, during which she’ll explore the topic of global warming. “My work is always dealing with contemporary culture,” Wagner says. “But it’s not work that bangs you over the head with a picket sign. Whatever it is I’m working with, there’s always these quiet metaphors.”
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