* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Victoria Wagner earned a BA from Humboldt State University and and MFA from Mills College. Her abstract compositions inhabit perceptual 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.
Victoria explains her work by saying, “My eye generally and naturally tends toward tessellation and pattern, seeking a rhythm that mimics regular pulse. On the one hand, visual order provides a place for the senses to rest, while color relationships create problems for the brain to solve. I like this simultaneity. There is something confusing to the senses in combinations that vacillate between interval and tone, allowing for optical engagement and a perceptual unpredictability. White space rushing like moving quickly past a picket fence that appears to pulsate in rhythmic visual beats. I imagine deep space being very much like this, an interpretive time signature, vibrating and arching indeterminately.”
