Merrill Wagner: Marking Time

In its emphasis on materiality and mutability, Wagner’s inventive work elides traditional categories of painting, relief, sculpture, and installation. Emerging in the 1960s, at a moment when minimalism and post-minimalism became dominant idioms, Wagner both eschewed and embraced their primary concerns, creating rigorous, hard-edged abstract compositions that subtly referenced the genre of landscape.

Painted works on steel and slate from the 1980s and 1990s installed in the front room of the gallery testify to Wagner’s innovative use of materials traditionally reserved for sculpture. Through the artist’s methods of markmaking and juxtaposition, these heavy surfaces are transformed into light and nimble compositions that utilize the language of painting.

By the mid-1970s, the artist largely moved away from canvas and looked to nontraditional supports as surfaces for color. Soon after, she received a large quantity of slate chalkboards and fragments that had been removed during the renovation of P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in New York.

While the artist had previously used slate as a support, this donation made it her primary focus throughout that period. These alternative substrates interested Wagner not only for their textural appearance but also for their allusions to the natural world and their inherent connection to process and chance.

The largest such work on display, Gorges (1986), measures twenty feet across and is composed of a sequence of irregularly shaped slate fragments that lean against the wall and have been partially painted in shades of blue. With its craggy silhouette and tranquil palette, Gorges reads at once like a mountain range, a quarry, a horizon line, or the watery ravines for which it is named.

Likewise, the paintings on steel—part of a body of work that Wagner began in the late 1980s—seamlessly juxtapose the organic and the industrial; using primarily rust preventative paint on cold-rolled steel, Wagner applies swathes of color to the steel’s glossy surface. These reflective works, with their industrial materiality and their bands of pigment, are reminiscent of minimalist sculpture.

Wagner’s Pacific Northwest upbringing is resonant throughout her practice, and she has continued to make work outdoors throughout her career. By integrating the support within the compositional logic of her works, and ordering and joining fragments by adding painted elements, Wagner mediates between the natural and the constructed.

The middle room of the exhibition foregrounds Wagner’s expansive engagement with the practice of drawing, which provides another avenue for the artist to embed the passage of time in her works.

In the major sculpture Cat’s Cradle (1989), white waxed thread is wound around sewing hooks at either side of the work and stretched in a triangular pattern across a large piece of slate, which is itself marked with horizontal lines in white oil pastel. Drawn and threaded lines are woven together, forming a kind of optical illusion that traverses physical dimensions.

In a group of works on paper from the mid-1970s, Wagner uses the unorthodox material of masking tape to guide the appearance and outcome of her drawings, using it as a temporary stencil, or at times, incorporating tape in the final composition itself. These works represent an important evolution in the artist’s approach wherein process and form become intrinsically linked and the transient nature of material is revealed.

Centrally featured in Marking Time are photographs that document Wagner’s practice of creating outdoor site-specific interventions on unassuming surfaces, such as on fences and rock outcroppings, that she leaves unprotected from the elements to fade over a long period of time—a conceptual process that she likened to a scientific experiment.

While some of Wagner’s chosen materials are naturally occurring and others are human-made, they are united by a common thread: they have all borne witness to time, conjuring associations with geological histories. As much about the evolution of the surrounding landscape as it is about the artist’s painted intervention, these photographic suites occasion a poetic meditation on the role of chance and entropy in the formation of built environments and the natural world.

As the exhibition’s title suggests, Wagner’s practice is concerned with the recording of time in multiple registers. Moving with ease between a range of supports—including canvas, paper, slate, stone, and steel—she draws and paints directly on the surface of her works, allowing pigments to fade and mutate as they, in turn, mark the cycling of the seasons.