REVIEW: Elise Wagner – Tipping Points
Frederick Holmes Gallery, Seattle • May 5 – 31, 2022
Shimmering like heat waves over mysterious landscapes, Elise Wagner’s solo exhibition of encaustic works at Frederick Holmes Gallery in Seattle combines a visionary sweep of terrestrial and celestial adventures with intriguingly sensual surfaces and dynamic fields of color and activity. A visual explorer with a keen affinity toward examining the relationship of science, nature, and imagination, Wagner’s art is both elegant and urgent, yielding compelling images rich with detail and nuance.
A tipping point is when a critical mass of any material, whether physical or virtual, triggers a sudden and unanticipated change. This artwork captures the churning, unsettled energy that marks transformations that Wagner sees happening on a macro, outer, scale, as well as personal tipping points of her own over the last few years. This broad scope of reference, and the sense of dynamic events and processes in the work, is reminiscent of the speculative explorations of the Dynaton painters (Gordon Onslow Ford, Lee Mullican, and Wolfgang Paalen; Dynaton is Greek for “the possible”), a group of mid-20th-century artists concerned with the bridging of our inner unknown worlds with those of space and science.
Though generally not extremely large (the biggest does not exceed 60”), the work nonetheless evokes an expansive sense of scale. Much of Wagner’s art suggests the cosmos, and the vast spaces and mysteries to be found there, yet she finds a continuity between those works and others that refer to Earth, and her concerns with impending environmental collapse, as well as the capabilities and limitations of science to address that concern, are brought to the fore. How can we retain our fascination with distant worlds when we are not able – or willing – to focus on our own planetary home?
“Glacier Stream,” a vertical work that might call to mind a topographic map, references both the current ice melt in Antarctica of the Larsen-C ice shelf (a direct result of climate warming), and the formation of the Columbia Gorge (in Washington) during the last ice age, millennia ago. A diagonal band of pale aquamarine blue bisects the composition, fading into faintly ivory-toned areas marbled with thin ridges of wax, the gentle undulations of color a subtle conflation of the ancient and contemporary forces molding our physical environment. In a similar vein, “Willamette,” which refers to the ancient flood that formed the Willamette Valley, suggests not so much a map as an Asian scroll painting. Through the center of the panel is a meandering passage of bright, cool-green areas that could read as water, amid a field of pale yellow, accented with a passage of red marks along one edge. A rich texture of marks in the surface is set off by color rubbed into those areas, and Wagner has further embellished the encaustic with characters and symbols derived from ancient astrological systems and languages.
Wagner’s paintings transport us to enigmatic places of swirling activity and billows of color. Though much of her artwork teems with saturated hues, some pieces present a binary of contrasting color and almost monochrome areas, like “Opposing Cartographies VII,” which juxtaposes two square panels of different colors and visual activity. On the left is a constellation of delicate arcs and lines in white, which are set off against the background of marine blue, punctuated with brush strokes and small circular marks. The right-hand panel has an almost matte surface, and is scumbled with a gray-mauve glaze that accentuates the texture and contour of the wax. Conversely, “Cross Tides,” just completed this year, revels in color and surface relief. A latticework of wax occupies most of the painting area, below a deep goldenrod form that swirls through the top of the piece. The lattice color smoothly shifts from the gold of the top form, to the deep blue toward the bottom of the painting.
Ambitious in scope, this body of work shows Wagner’s deft ability to bring a unique energy and vision to the use of an ancient art material, making it an effective vehicle for her ideas. The subtle quality of these artworks is best seen in person, to experience the nuanced way light interacts with the encaustic.
Through May 31:
Frederick Holmes & Company
Tuesday – Saturday, 10:00am – 5:00pm
309 Occidental Avenue South • Seattle, Washington 98104
