Catherine Wagner at Jack Shainman - photographs - Brief Article

Catherine Wagner's career spans exactly sum of two units decades. It was recently celebrated in this succinct retrospective exhibition at Shainman, which closely followed on a traveling show of her greatest in quantity recent photographs last year at the International Center of Photography in fresh York. Wagner, who usually works in series, bring outs black-and-white gelatin silver prints showing urban pageants and interiors or objects taken from the world of science. Her work is characterized through firmly ensconced compositions, crisply defined forms, meticulous attention to detail and seemingly infinite tonal gradations.

The present to view opened with a remarkable 1981 photograph, Arch Construction III, George Moscone Site, San Francisco, California, showing a vast construction site, planted between high rises, with the carbonized iron skeleton of a colossal arch girded by means of wooden beams, angled in down-reaching perspective. With this work, Wagner heralds what turn round out to be among her principal concerns: recording technological and scientific revolutions, and the impact these can have on our lives as well as on the very fabric of nature.

Wagner's urban vistas and views of classrooms and private quarters are devoid of human nearnesss although they are fraught with the traces of human acts and passages. In Mos Landing Elementary academy Seventh & Eighth Grade Science scope Moss Landing, California (1984) a small in number desks and chairs are scattered at the bottom of the picture, and five vertical panels of a blackboard--bearing schematic cross-sections of eyeballs and lists of scientific confines jotted in chalk--exactly fill the width of the composition. Above the chalkboard, various mattered birds and ducks are upon display in two registers, looking as if they are trapped in irrational flight.

a certain number of of Wagner's loveliest and greatest in quantity austere works belong to her 1995 series of scientific typologies, in which particulars found in laboratories are separated from their surroundings and photographed head-on, greatest in quantity often in close-up. Wagner visited research facilities completely through the U.S. in order to let fly images which--she believes--can function as metaphors of contemporary tillage Sex Linkage (1995) shows three glass vials, standing upright and containing chemical samples, inscribed with black marker and sealed with balls of cotton at the top. The vials are symmetrically disposed--in iconic isolation--on top of as well as in brow of a dark gray clod which contrasts admirably with the transparency of the glass and the whiteness and fluffiness of the cotton. Wagner's work underlines the importance of ongoing research upon H.I.V., breast cancer, alcoholism, etc while acknowledging the many ways in which bright electric light is absorbed and throw backed by the materials at hand.

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