Mirabel Wigon - (Im)permeable Film

MIRABEL WIGON

(Im)permeable Film represents a chance to view the recent work of my colleague, Mirabel Wigon. I feel very fortunate to have her as a new colleague in the Department of Art at California State University, Stanislaus, and thrilled to have the opportunity to work with Mirabel on this exhibition.

Mirabel’s work compounds various painting languages which create fragmented pictorial space depicting massively unpredictable systems. These visually complex large-scale landscape paintings leave the viewer constantly scanning the work, shifting their attention as the forms are revealed upon prolonged examination. Each piece is a direct response to the built and natural environment prompting the viewer to consider their relative position, depth perception, and vantage point. The viewer will be constantly amazed at the complex and thoroughly executed painting surfaces.

The work contained within is a direct response to her lived experience, spanning a period of approximately three years. Like Mirabel, I went to graduate school in the Los Angeles area. While there, I also experienced the richness and culture of Southern California, and I can see in her work the same influences. However, in her newest body of work, we can see a shift in color and form resulting from being immersed in her new home in the Central Valley. It becomes clear how location and environmental events have influenced her practice.

It is my pleasure to exhibit Mirabel Wigon’s work for others to enjoy. I thank the many colleagues who have been instrumental in presenting this exhibition. Marie Thibeault, Professor Emeritus, California State University, Long Beach, for her wonderful catalog essay; Kory Twaddle, Gallery Assistant, for organizing and arranging the show details; Brad Peatross of the School of the Arts, California State University, Stanislaus, for the catalog design; and Parks Printing for producing this catalog. Many thanks to the Instructionally Related Activates Program of California State University, Stanislaus, as well as anonymous donors for funding the exhibition and catalog. Their support is greatly appreciated.

Dean De Cocker, Director University Art Gallery California State University, Stanislaus

Corrosion, Oil on Canvas, 72” x 96”, 2020

Image courtesy of Amanda Quinlan

ARTIST STATEMENT

The world we live in is contingent on, and influenced by, massively unpredictable systems that define an understanding of space, place, and depth. My paintings are a conglomeration of signs, where the accumulation of imagery and painted layers creates a perplexing and tenuous notion of the “whole” built from many discrete fragments of perception. Technological systems mediate a vast amount of information which shapes the conception of space. These systems alter one’s experience of space through accumulation, imbalance, and overload, resulting in opulence teetering at the edge of collapse. The opulence visible in my practice explores experience, immersion, and separation within my immediate environment. I create landscape paintings that contend with environmental phenomena and the built environment. The paintings acknowledge infrastructure instability and ecological degradation as dire existential threats, emphasizing the flawed modernist narrative of progress and innovation.

The work contends with various painting languages of abstraction, naturalism, digital codes, and diagrammatic schemes to layer representations of a place, resulting in a compounded view. Maquettes and collages serve as source material for, and are constructed in tandem with, my paintings. The paintings transform through a process that weaves between the various stages of development. Upon the flat plane of the canvas, space is the framework used to organize forms, creating a sense of place. In my work, conceptions of place are augmented by multiple vantage points conflated upon a single plane. Spatial relationships are explored on the canvas through the juxtaposition of real and represented depth. Color accentuates these relationships, simultaneously reinforcing continuity and dissonance. Digital codes, botanical forms, and environmental conditions influence the large swathes of analogous areas which are broken by oppositional colors, creating instability and visual tension in the paintings. Fractured space, shifting screens, and atmospheric conditions obfuscate and interrupt the viewer while simultaneously offering new visual pathways or conditions by which the work may be read. Much like the shifting visual emphasis in the viewer’s experience, changes in our environment are usually discovered in a non-linear fashion and exposed after prolonged looking.

The paintings’ surface complexity is a product of continual accumulation of visual imagery and materials. The scenes depicted in my paintings are contradictions, where form and gesture take on multiple aspects. The incongruously held together forms allude to the instability inherent in our environment. The work has evolved from overt messages relating to the disparaging of energy production and distribution, to utilizing the landscape and environmental phenomena as a metaphor for catharsis amid tumultuous instability. In the most recent work, an event predicates a transcendental experience in the face of the sublime. In the wake of uncertainty, I long for a reconciliatory stance and dream for a stable future. The work aims to coalesce a colossal amount of contradictory information to create a nebulous space in the work, amplifying anxieties, yet offering hope in the face of uncertainty.

REFRAMING THE SUBLIME

By Marie Thibeault

During the darkest days of the pandemic, Mirabel Wigon was furiously working on a series of luminous canvases that would comprise her stunning Master of Fine Arts exhibition at California State University, Long Beach. Wigon’s thesis, (Per)mutations, was an ambitious project and exhibition comprised of multiple works referencing specific energy production facilities she likened to organisms connecting and affecting the greater urban ecosystem.

Wigon’s vision began to change when in 2021, she relocated to the Central Valley, where she accepted a position as professor of art at California State University, Stanislaus. Responding to the new terrain and vistas, her cityscapes gave way to the open sky. A shift of color began to reflect the immediate environment much as it informed Richard Diebenkorn and many quintessential West Coast landscape painters. Continuing her evocation of the sublime landscape experience based on the profoundly destabilizing feelings upon encountering certain overwhelming natural phenomena or human excess, evidence of wildfires, cataclysmic cloud structures and vast panoramic vistas have become prominent subjects. What did not change and perhaps became more critical was her use of the grid as a framing device.

In the recent paintings a magical space of chromatic illumination, abstracted architectural illusion, and competing conceptual constructs, all meld into a convincing impactful whole. Painting is a highly orchestrated construction for Wigon, and as a maximalist painter, she freely combines multiple visual sources and modalities in each canvas to achieve her richly nuanced and spatially active compositions. Informed by direct experience as well as substantial research, Wigon develops her complex compositions by combining digital sources with carefully observed three dimensional models that she builds as references. The grid is used as a device for mapping: organizing space which functions as a structure to shift orientation, jump scale and to change vantage points. For Wigon, this slippage acts as a metaphor for how we receive sensory stimulus from the environment over a period of time.

Wigon is a consummate colorist. Inspired by the natural as well as digital worlds she daringly invents color structures that dramatize the effects of the technological sublime engulfing civilization. In Offshore (2020) a cinematic magenta and indigo nocturn, an oil rig monstrosity is dramatically lit from below. The massive structure fills the top third of the canvas and precariously floats above the toxic ocean-scape underworld. Corrosion (2020) completed during the pandemic, depicts the breakdown of aging industrial structures as they morph and expand into a gargantuan organism that seems to be mutating out of control. Rust, gold, and silver conflate the subject with the mineral nature of paint. The built up and dense surface make tangible a sense of emerging danger.

Further immersing the viewer in the sublime experience, Cloud Screen (2021), an enormous cloud staggers across the distant hills with cubistic repetition against a series of screen-like frames. Similarly, an apparent fire storm swirls and slices through Flare (2022), whose vortex engulfs a distant valley in an amalgamation of environmental havoc. In Event Horizon (2022) the picture plane staggers with instability and existential anxiety while an other- worldly sunburst simultaneously conjures the threat of fire storms but also the hope of a transcendence.

In his comprehensive text on contemporary landscape painting Barry Schwabsky states, “The idea of landscape has been recurrently usable by artists who wanted to grapple with transformation.” The present with its ecological degradation urgently requires such a transformation. Acknowledging that landscape painting has been the vehicle for depicting humanity’s mastery of nature, Wigon’s work questions the dominant 19th and 20th century American landscape painting traditions that focused on exploration and emphasized industrial development’s supremacy over nature by altering the landscape. With this history in mind, Wigon’s work both extends this tradition and subverts it by transforming landscape imagery into a complex, multi-perspectival arena that profoundly aligns with the psyche and contemporary experiences of infrastructure instability and ecological destruction. Historically as W.J.T. Mitchell explains, the landscape consisted of a “prospect that dominates, frames, and codifies the landscape in terms of a set of fairly predictable conventions”. By dispensing with the singular approaches and totalizing narratives that drove myths of progress, Wigon’s engagement of multiple modes of representation and interpretation underscores the flawed modernist narrative of progress and innovation to alternatively open debates concerning our complicated relationship to the (eco)systems and networks in which we exist. She describes the organic and inorganic as in a constant state of flux. There are no distinct hierarchies or binaries either in painting or these newer landscape spaces; as Bruno Latour has observed, “actants affect one another”.

Such fiercely intelligent work bears witness to a rapidly changing world and contributes to the current discourse on landscape by addressing its inherent social-political implications and by embracing the notion that painting and technology are both critical ways of mediating and assessing our understanding and experience of the environment. In contrast to the scientific model, however, which regards landscape imagery as a reflection of the exterior world, painting also importantly reveals interior states of consciousness and emotions. It additionally makes use of metaphor. Wigon’s newly imagined landscapes have moved from a distanced theatrically constructed urban setting to a place in which the viewer feels immersed by the vortex and a color saturated liquidity that resists containment and cognitive filters. Her paintings expand and reframe the cathartic potentialities characterizing the traditional sublime when emerging from the terror filled encounter to keep us fully present amidst the tumult.

Burnout, Oil on Canvas, 60” x 72”, 2022

Apparitions, Oil on Canvas, 48” x 60”, 2022

Radial Wave, Oil on Canvas, 48” x 60”, 2022

Event Horizon, Oil on Canvas, 48” x 60”, 2022

Undulating Topography, Oil on Canvas, 48” x 60”, 2022

Flare, Oil on Canvas, 60” x 72”, 2022

Converging, Oil on Canvas, 30” x 30”, 2022

Radiant Burn (high intensity low duration), Oil on Canvas, 30” x 30”, 2022

Cloak, Oil on Canvas, 36” x 48”, 2022

Vortex, Oil on Canvas, 48” x 60”, 2021

Cloud Screen, Oil on Canvas, 48” x 48”, 2021

Luminosity #1, Pastel, Chalk, Charcoal, Vellum on Paper, 29.5” x 41.5”, 2021

Ocular Drift, Oil on Canvas, 72” x 96”, 2021

Moss, Oil on Canvas, 72” x 96”, 2020

Excavation, Oil on Canvas, 60” x 72”, 2020

Offshore, Oil on Canvas, 60” x 48”, 2020

Rupture, Oil on Canvas, 72” x 60”, 2020

Transformer, Oil on Panel, 48” x 36”, 2020

Porcupine Hill, Oil on Canvas, 60” x 72”, 2019

The Island, Oil on Canvas, 60” x 72”, 2019

MIRABEL WIGON CV

EDUCATION

2021 Master of Fine Arts, Drawing & Painting, Dean’s List, California State University, Long Beach, Long Beach, CA

2014 Bachelor of Fine Arts, Traditional Art, Cum Laude, California State University, East Bay, Hayward, CA

ACADEMIC EXPERIENCE

2021- Assistant Professor, Art Department, California State University, Stanislaus, CA

SELECT SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2022 Displaced, MSR President’s Office, Turlock, CA

Shifting Ground, Michael Stearns Studio, San Pedro, CA

2021 (Per)mutations, Gatov Gallery, Long Beach, CA

2019 Urban Labyrinth, Dutzi Gallery, Long Beach, CA

2017 Seemingly Corporal Structures, Professional Development Center, Oakland, CA

2016 Lamentations in Time, White Buffalo Gallery, Sacramento, CA

2014 A Sense of Urgency, University Art Gallery, Hayward, CA

SELECT GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2022 Double Take, Axis Gallery, Sacramento, CA

Fire & Water, University Art Gallery, Hayward, CA

New Voices, Jacki Headley University Art Gallery, Chico, CA

Unheard Voices, Fullerton Event Center, Fullerton, CA

Sunflowers for Ukraine, Flatline, Long Beach, CA

All Four Horizons, Flatline, Long Beach, CA

Please Wait, Saddleback Art Gallery, Mission Vejo, CA

2021 Horizon 2.0, Shoebox Projects, Los Angeles, CA (virtual)

Drawn to Paper: Fresh Perspectives in Mixed Media, Brea Gallery, Brea, CA

Painted 2021: 5th Biennial Survey, Manifest Gallery, Cincinnati, OH

ALPAY: Now Trending, Palos Verdes Art Center, Palos Verdes, CA (virtual)

Made in California, Brea Gallery, Brea, CA

2020 Electric, Midnight Gallery, Long Beach, CA

Remembrance, AT a Distance Gallery, Hayward, CA

Hobson’s Choice, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA

Insights, Kleefeld Contemporary Art Museum, Long Beach, CA

Fog, Gatov Gallery, Long Beach, CA

2019 Grad Critique Week, Gatov Gallery, Long Beach, CA

ALPAY: Now Trending, Palos Verdes Art Center, Palos Verdes, CA

President’s Show, Miller House, Long Beach, CA

Insights Show, UAM, Long Beach CA

2018 Grad Critique Week, Merlino Gallery, Long Beach, CA

Alumni Show, University Art Gallery, Hayward, CA

2017 100 Under 100, WAL Public Market Gallery, Sacramento, CA

Inner Soul, Uptown Studios, Sacramento, CA

Identity, Apothic Heart Tattoo Collective, Sacramento, CA

Art Showcase, Cafe Colonial, Sacramento, CA

M5Arts Benefit Show, Ruhstaller Beer, Sacramento, CA

Rising, University Art Gallery, Hayward, CA

2016 The Impression: A Print Survey, Blue Line Arts, Sacramento, CA

City of Trees Art and Ink Expo, Convention Center, Sacramento, CA

Sacramento Open Studios, Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento, CA

SELECT GRANTS/AWARDS/HONORS

2022 Faculty Center for Excellence in Teaching & Learning Grant

Instructional Related Activities Award

President Commission on Diversity and Inclusion Grant

2021 Faculty Center for Excellence in Teaching & Learning Grant

Research Scholarly and Creative Activities Grant

2020 Marilyn Werby Endowed Scholarship

2019 Provost Purchase Award

Linda Day Memorial Scholarship

PERMANENT COLLECTIONS

2019 Provost Collection CSULB, Long Beach, CA

PRESS/MEDIA

2022 Melina Paris, “Shifting Ground, An Exhibition of Works by Mirabel Wigon”, Random Length News, February 24, 2022.

2021 Alexander Zimmerman, Interview, MFA Chronicles Podcast, March 6, 2021.

SELECT PRESENTATIONS

2022 Artist Lecture, Visiting Artist Lecture Series, CSU Chico, CA

All Four Horizon’s Artist Panel, Flatline Gallery, Long Beach, CA

2021 Professional Practice Panel, BFA Capstone Course Fall 21, CSU Long Beach, CA

Common Ground – Artist Panel, Manifest, Cincinnati, OH

SELECT CURATORIAL PROJECTS

2022 Double Take, Axis Gallery, Sacramento, CA

2021 California MFA Exhibition, CSU Long Beach Gallery Complex, Long Beach, CA

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, STANISLAUS

Dr. Ellen Junn, President

Dr. Kimberly Greer, Provost/Vice President of Academic Affairs

Dr. James A. Tuedio, Dean, College of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

DEPARTMENT OF ART

Martin Azevedo, Associate Professor, Chair

Tricia Cooper, Lecturer

Dean De Cocker, Professor

James Deitz, Lecturer

Daniel Edwards, Associate Professor

Jessica Gomula-Kruzic, Professor

Dr. Alice Heeren, Assistant Professor

Daniel Heskamp, Lecturer

Chad Hunter, Lecturer

Dr. Carmen Robbin, Professor Ellen Roehne, Lecturer

Dr. Staci Scheiwiller, Associate Professor

Susan Stephenson, Associate Professor

Jake Weigel, Associate Professor

Mirabel Wigon, Assistant Professor

Alex Quinones Instructional Tech II

Kyle Rambatt, Equipment Technician II

UNIVERSITY ART GALLERIES

Dean De Cocker, Director

Kory Twaddle, Gallery Assistant

SCHOOL OF THE ARTS

Brad Peatross, Graphic Specialist II

SPECIAL THANKS

Marie Thibeault, Professor Emerita, CSULB

Images courtesy of Muzi Rowe

Mirabel Wigon - (Im)permeable Film

January 24–February 28, 2023 | Stan State Art Space, California State University, Stanislaus | 226 N. First St., Turlock, CA 95380

100 copies printed. Copyright © 2023 California State University, Stanislaus • ISBN 978-1-940753-75-1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher. This exhibition and catalog have been funded by Associated Students Instructionally Related Activities, California State University, Stanislaus.