SmArts

August 22-28, 2016

Profile in brief: Artist Virginia Wagner

By Molly Rector

For each the next four weeks, I will interview and profile one of the other artists and writers currently in residence at the Edward F. Albee Foundation. This week, I took a studio tour with painter Virginia Wagner, 2016 recipient of the prestigious Lotos Award in Painting, who teaches at Montclair State University and Pratt Institute, and runs the blog Painters on Paintings.

Wagner’s studio is in the back of the converted barn the fellows live in – it still has the basic structure of a barn with the stable stalls knocked out. Montauk has been very warm, and the barn doesn’t have air conditioning, so Wagner and I were both sweating already as I began to ask her about her work.

Her paintings vary greatly in size, in content, and in palette. On the wall are two scenes from an abandoned resort in Bombay Beach, California; an image featuring an old fort in Brooklyn torn apart by ocean storms and a scene depicting a friend’s memorial service on a pier in New York.

I asked Wagner if she sees these works in conversation with one another or as separate projects, and she answered “both,” pointing out that these scenes all take place “at junctures where there’s a lot of tension between human presence and the environments, sites where there’s been a lot of destruction or decay and then often humans have tried to build something from that.” Later, she adds that she is drawn to places that “look like they are at the brink of what humans can survive – possibly because, of what humans have done.”

While she is interested in the impact humans have on the natural environment, her work isn’t didactic, and it isn’t especially dark – her work is emotional, but it’s also playful. A fan of Joseph Campbell and Simon Schama, she believes that the work of the artist is often to externalize interior spaces, and to create mythologies that reflect the challenges and dilemmas of the contemporary world.

Her greatest value seems to be balancing the themes of natural forces and human influence, by playfully examining ritual to create work that captures both the strangeness and beauty of how humans relate to the world. “I think about ritual a lot,” she says, “it can be a way of mapping meaning onto chaos…and in another way I think it can be us making peace with the natural forces and the inevitable.” She says she tries to keep her intentions loose, that “by being playful you just make discoveries – no matter if it’s in art or life.”

Wagner comes from a family of biologists, and the sense of discovery that pervades scientific fields also permeates her work. Her dad is an entomologist whose field guides she has illustrated, and with whom she plans to travel to South America this winter in search of the white witch moth – a project she describes as the perfect intersection of their interests: a process of discovery in the natural world that dovetails between the rational and the mystical.

More of Wagner’s beautiful thoughts, as well as images of her paintings and links to her two blogs, can be found on her website, studiovirginia.com.

Molly Rector is a staff writer for the Daily Record. Contact her at molly@dailydata.com.