Intimately entangled with both landscape and fabricated industrial materials, Wagner’s sculptural paintings evoke visible and unseen realms. She grew up on the eastern slope of the Sierras, where tribal land and wild horses converge with dramatic vistas, sprawling ranches and 24-hour casino culture. Abject poverty exists alongside extreme, yet modest wealth. The air is thin, temperatures can be extreme, people work hard, play harder and the enormity of the sky and mountains feel like a religious experience. It is a place simultaneously chaotic and tranquil, rugged and contained. Coming of age in this landscape, amidst the cultural conditions, people and wildlife, Victoria learned about the relationships between land and its inhabitants, and became aware of industry’s great ironies — how its employment is necessary to people’s sustenance while its operations affect the health of the land. Having become sensitive to contrasting extremes, her work contains the tension of coexisting visual and theoretical paradoxes. In her painted wood and metal artworks, she uses unlikely material pairings and unusual color combinations to gently aggravate the viewer’s existing assumptions about spatial relationships. Working with disparate and seemingly unrelated elements, She is able to re-orchestrate and organize them into harmonic relationships that reveal unexpected beauty.

As tangible evidence of physical experience, reflective surfaces, spectral phenomenon and materiality, she desires that her work  behaves like a desert mirage — that it can be at once a trick of the eye and also a mystical, transcendent moment. Her material choice is inspired by the sentient and energetic exchange between objects and living creatures; She is drawn to that which is familiar but overlooked. Aluminum, for instance, is a steady and ubiquitous material in everyday life; it is often found in domestic settings and is the most abundant mineral in the planet’s core. Wood, on the other hand, is shy and much less boisterous. Through the prolonged intimacy of debarking, shaping and sanding, she slowly but continuously discovers wood’s inner workings, its secrets and history. Most of her wood has been intentionally sourced from nearby forests in Northern California.

“I find that working with local wood provides a connection to land and becomes a practice of stewardship. Beyond the visible realm is a plane of vibration, energy, and mystery. This plane is where empirical knowledge becomes interwoven with belief, where our eyes can play tricks on us, where logic is overwritten by feeling and where my imagery originates. Through engagement and observation of nature’s patterns, I witness coincidence, reveal symbols, notice colors, explore relationships and feel a deep resonance with the spirit of the land. Overlaying geometric constellations onto organic topographies, my abstract compositions are as narrative as tree rings or cell structure or the materiality of aluminum.”

With paint, she creates prismatic spectrums that ripple, accelerate, reverberate and flow. Invoking transcendentalists, she uses color as an intuitive tool to increase balance within the body. In these ways her colorful multi-media assemblages seek to connect people and objects — through what is seen and sensed — to the mystical nature of our world.”

Daily Desires:

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