Dana Wigdor by monoGRAPHIQ

WIDGET PRESS

danawigdor.com

CHARACTERS

ENVIRONMENTS

MULTI-CANVAS STORIES

ESSAYS

ARTIST STATEMENT

C.V.

CHARACTERS

Us 2001 Oil on canvas 48" x 33" Photo: John Polak

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Lost 2002 Oil on canvas 48" x 33" Photo: John Polak

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Celestial Chord 2003 Oil on canvas 30" x 30" Photo: John Polak

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Finally 2002 Oil on canvas 36" x 34" Photo: John Polak

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We Were Like This 2002 Oil on canvas 48" x 53" Photo: John Polak

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The Night Jumpers 2005 Oil on canvas 43" x 34" Photo: John Polak

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ENVIRONMENTS

Peaceful Storm 2016 Oil on canvas 36" x 72"

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Inspiration 2016 Oil on canvas 36" x 72"

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Meditation 2016 Oil on canvas 36" x 48"

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Silence Rising 2016 Oil on canvas 36" x 48"

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Being There 2016 Oil on canvas 36" x 72"

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Autumn Passage 2016 Oil on canvas 36" x 48"

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Birdie 2015 Oil on canvas 36" x 36" Photo: Liam Goodman

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The Deep 2015 Oil on canvas 36" x 36"

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Seaside Evening 2016 Oil on canvas 36" x 36"

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Show Me The Answer 2015 Oil on canvas 36" x 36"

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View From The Swing 2005 Oil on canvas 42" x 25"

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Memories 2005 Oil on canvas 42" x 25"

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MULTI-CANVAS STORIES

THE BUBBLE MAKERS Insight (Left) 2015 Oil on canvas 24" x 24" Photo: John Polak

Alignment (Right) 2015 Oil on canvas 30" x 30" Photo: John Polak

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THE BUBBLE MAKERS Us Three (Left) 2015 Oil on canvas 24" x 24" Photo: John Polak

Orbit (Right) 2015 Oil on canvas 30" x 30" Photo: John Polak

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THE BUBBLE MAKERS Tug (Left) 2015 Oil on canvas 24" x 24" Photo: John Polak

Gratitude (Right) 2015 Oil on canvas 30" x 30" Photo: John Polak

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THE BUBBLE MAKERS The Maker (Left) 2015 Oil on canvas 24" x 24"

The Storm (Right) 2015 Oil on canvas 30" x 30" Photo: John Polak

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THE BUBBLE MAKERS The Phantom Shippe (Left) 2015 Oil on canvas 24" x 24"

Alpha Selona (Right) 2015 Oil on canvas 30" x 30" Photo: Liam Goodman

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FUGUE Fugue 2003 Oil on canvas, diptych 30" x 30" (each panel) Photo: John Polak

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FUGUE Diver 2003 Oil on canvas, diptych 40" x 40" (each panel)

FUGUE Counting Backwards 2003 Oil on canvas, diptych 30" x 24" (each panel)

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FUGUE Different Plane 2003 Oil on canvas, diptych 30" x 45" (left panel) 18" x 30" (right panel)

ESSAYS

WIGDOR’S ART HOVERS BETWEEN THE REAL AND THE IMAGINED Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a UFO? No, it’s a Wigdor, a “wiggle” in time, a charmingly bizarre occurrence on canvas, a myopic journey into the world of the “un-self conscious,” a tour-de-force in creative genius. Dana Wigdor creates the unexpected: celestial “beings” or “events” which float like hovercraft over ice-lit landscapes. Her paintings are close encounters of the painted kind—a twilight zone between the unconscious machinations of her mind and the highly technical doodles of her flying toy-like “beings.” Usually people respond to Wigdor’s work by asking if the images in her paintings are UFOs. She finds the response amusing: “They are unidentified flying objects, but I’m not a UFO enthusiast — people seem to find their own stories. I’m not spoon-feeding imagery. It’s something you haven’t seen before.” Jules Verne’s Time Machine comes to mind or Renaissance sketches of Michelangelo’s machines. The objects in the paintings are so unique that they offer the opportunity to play with one’s unconscious associations with known objects. Wigdor’s paintings are well-crafted in tone and structure. The juxtaposition of heavenly components of mechanical “beings” with the multiple mirrored effect of painted backdrop staging creates a brazenly complex effect. Using only three colors, the artist presents refractions of painted light breaking over cool, wintry landscapes as atmospheric stagings for tiny mechanical “beings” created from her unconscious. The effect is subtly theatrical as these “beings” hover like alien hang gliders over the cold and prismed land.

Wigdor explained that she reduced her palette to eliminate the distraction of choosing colors and to concentrate on achieving more detail in her “beings”: “I wanted a certain luminosity, light quality. It’s easier to address the scale of light and dark in your painting, if there’s only one or two colors; it’s a working tool. I do winter landscapes. The monochromatic blue does give a nostalgic, romantic quality to a landscape, like a black-and-white photograph gives a sense of timelessness.” Wigdor’s work bridges the living and images of an un-living mechanistic world. She explains: I am trying to depict these invented, floating creatures as alive, sentient creatures. Placing them in a landscape that is the least alive – the winter is a dead time of the surface of the world. In this dead winter place, the floating “beings” can be comparatively the most living thing. The other way I am trying to breathe sentience into these invented “beings” is by painting what is real and natural in an unrealistic way – painting what is unreal and artificial in a real way. The landscape is out of focus, the ‘being’ is in focus.” It is the process of creativity that intrigues Wigdor, how the artist’s subject matter arises “straight from the unconscious.” She says creativity is “the absence of self-consciousness.” To achieve that unselfconscious, creative place in herself, she uses two techniques. In a relaxed state of mind, she doodles images from her unconscious. Later she blocks out all but the most compelling of the images with an overlay of paint. The composition becomes a distillation of intense imagined mechanism. The overlying landscape becomes a staging devise, merely a backdrop to the theatrical display of the flying machine “beings.” The occluded under-painting hints at a three-dimensional universe that is both real and unreal in its executed clarity. In the creation process, Wigdor bridges her own mental world and her sense of emotional well-being. She says it 60 :: 61

These beings have vibrating wings and bejeweled torsos. Like some new and exotic species, their bulbous eyes and patterned bodies speak of tropical rainforests. The cooler spirit of the artist’s winged UFOs now emerges into a wild world capable of supporting this new life form of flying frog.

“provides me a valuable integration between the mental and the emotional — between unselfconsciousness and self-critique. Through painting, I reconcile these two parts of myself. I hope to produce work that is both technical, cerebral - and gutsy and emotional.” A desk-top publisher based in Brattleboro, Wigdor formerly worked in the World Trade Center. When asked if 9/11 had an impact on her paintings, she recalled that she had created her unidentified flying objects before that fatal event. However, she says, she was “very impacted by that. There’s a loneliness, sad quality to my work—a sad inflexion—the descent of this floating thing after a bombing. (9/11) changed how I felt about (painting). It had a sadder, lonelier feel.” Wigdor has always created her own world. After high school, she went straight to art school. She recalls her mother saying to her: “I think you were always disappointed in the world, I think you wanted to just invent your own.” She was the day-dreaming kid in her class, “floating ou t the window,” she recalls. Wigdor’s works are doodles of a world of magical, mechanical toys flying in the sky. The paintings are a bridge between the cerebral, structured world of the adult and the fantasy of childhood musings. It is the artist’s way of “floating out the window” and into another world of flying machines, “beings” which have effortless abilities to travel at will through the warp of time and space. Dana Wigdor has been invited as a guest artist by Petria Mitchell to display more recent work at Windham Art Gallery’s “Shared Inspiration” show this month. These diptychs are bridges between winter and spring, the panels soaring from cold blue facets of light to soft, emergent green. The new-found “beings” of one diptych titled “Fugue” are even more dramatic when compared with her work at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center. The technological spirit of her mechanical “beings” have coalesced into true life forms. Like a shaman shape-shifting her lively machines to pure anima, the artist breaks a thin

membrane between her aerodynamic machine “beings” into palpable amphibians. These beings have vibrating wings and bejeweled torsos. Like some new and exotic species, their bulbous eyes and patterned bodies speak of tropical rainforests. The cooler spirit of the artist’s winged UFOs now emerges into a wild world capable of supporting this new life form of flying frog. DIANA LISCHER-GOODBAND, Brattleboro Reformer

WHAT ARE THESE SCI-FI CREATURES IN OUR WOODS? At first, Dana Wigdor’s paintings look like realistic winter landscapes. Mountains, snowy fields rimmed by fuzzy hedgerows and puffy cloud-filled skies form and recede in a hazy range of off-whites, steel gray and black. But it isn’t the fine landscapes that grab your attention: It’s the mysterious whirligigs hovering in the sky or alighting on the snow like giant dragonflies, or MQ-1 predator drones, that catch your eye. Incongruous and strangely mechanical as they are, Wigdor’s battleship gray, robotic creatures are believable in her bleak winter pictures of wilderness. Her subtle use of black and white allows her vehicular contraptions to fit into a natural world that has become a kind of twilight zone. Each of her seven large oil paintings in “Liminal Places” on view at the Spotlight Gallery in the Vermont Arts Council building in Montpelier this month is a variation on a theme one might call sci-fi meets Ansel Adams. The paintings conflate the familiar and the strange, in a natural, if disarmingly haunting way. The show also features her “miniatures.” These are tiny drawings, maybe four square inches each, in pen and ink and colored pencil. The drawings of objects and figures reflect Wigdor’s penchant for the fantastic and futuristic. She offers abstract images that come off as light, funny, even cartoonish. In one untitled miniature, a flying saucer hovers above the ground. A bird sits atop the saucer staring at a creature that looks like a bug with a large abdomen attached by a slim black line to the head. Nothing about this image is representative; it strongly invites interpretation.

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Her paintings achieve a rare balance between the conventional and the outrageous. Wigdor seems to see the beauty and the terror the world holds simultaneously.

Wigdor, who lives in Brattleboro, has had work appear in several galleries in Southeastern Vermont, including the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center and the Windham Art Gallery in Brattleboro. This is her first exhibition in Central Vermont. Her paintings achieve a rare balance between the conventional and the outrageous. Wigdor seems to see the beauty and the terror the world holds simultaneously. It’s a dual vision that reflects our relative isolation here in rural Vermont and the way in which the outside world interrupts our reverie with news of the CIA’s heat-seeking probes that destroyed an enclave of “terrorists” (including women and children) in Pakistan, or of the drones in Iraq controlled by Department of Defense personnel via laptop in the States. It’s a duality of perception that seems particularly apt now, as we go about our jobs and household chores. We’re a nation at war, as President George W. Bush likes to remind us. Remember? NAME, Sunday Rutland Herald

ARTIST STATEMENT There is an entire world in the luxe, multi-layered surface of an oil painting. I could work on one painting for the rest of my life and never come up empty, adding layer after layer of thick brushwork and then sanding it down when it’s dry. I rotate my canvases upside down on the easel many times while I’m working until there is a complex, beautiful texture of pure abstraction. I lay them in the middle of the floor in my studio, pacing in a circle, throwing down brushfulls of splashing oil and pigments. This is the glorious beginning of any painting, before it has an upward orientation and I am lost in a spinning field of varnish and powder. Painters will fawn over their materials, going on and on about the smells and sensations, how they are ‘in love’ with paint. I confess to be one of these people. I begin several canvases at a time in groups of 4, 6 or 8. At a certain point, after they have been wrestled to the floor and nurtured back to life a few times over, I finally turn them around to dry in my storage area. There they sit. An incubation period of sorts. I don’t look at them for quite a while—typically days or even weeks. My storage rack is a quagmire of thick surfaces that are gooey from recent work and turned around in the dark corners to dry. When I bring them out again the fossilized brush strokes look new and animated, like something trying to be born. Shapes that curiously resemble landing gear will often be the first to grab my attention. These are either cylindrical, metalic shapes that are blocky and weighted, or smaller instruments, like the stylus of a morse code aparatus reaching down to communicate. If I am patient, other shapes pop out of the thick scribble — the delicate, thin webbing of something that both flies and swims. Thin membranes and lattice appear like curved mirrors in the sky.

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These disjointed shapes appear incedentally on the canvas, like transient pictures in the clouds. I act quickly to trace their edges and coax more detail. What happens next is the most amazing moment—when I have captured the likeness of a personality hidden there. Out of the chalky marble dust and oily glaze, there it is — an entire, living vessel separates from the paint scribble and becomes a living being. I call these creatures Widgets. They are the darlings of pure abstraction and one of the most joyous things that have ever happened to me.

C.V. MFA, Vermont College of Fine Arts, 2008

2002 Collected Works, Brattleboro VT, “New Paintings” solo exhibition

School of Visual Arts, Painting in New York Summer Studio Residency, 1998

1998 Jonathan Shorr Gallery, NYC, “Art Discoveries”

BFA, San Francisco Art Institute, 1990

1998 School of Visual Arts, NYC, “Painting in New York Summer Studio Residency Open Studios”

EDUCATION

EXHIBITIONS 2015 Riverwinds Gallery, Beacon, NY, “The Bubble Makers” 2014 Kunsthalle Beacon (KUBE), Beacon, NY, “Principals/Principles” 2013 Art Design Consultants, Cincinnati, OH, “Art Comes Alive 2013” 2011 The Living Room, Cold Spring, NY, “The Floating Verse” 2008 Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier, VT, “Graduate Exhibition” 2006 The Vermont Arts Council, Montpelier, VT, “Liminal Places” solo exhibition 2005 The Windham Art Gallery, Brattleboro, VT, “Dana Wigdor, Earth and Sky” solo exhibition 2004 Gallery in the Woods, Brattleboro, VT 2004 The Windham Art Gallery, Brattleboro, VT, “New Members Show” 2003 Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, VT, “Spirited Women: Ten Vermont Artists” 2003 Fleming Museum of Art, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, “Ten Vermont Women, Sculpture, Painting & Craft” 2003 The Windham Art Gallery, Brattleboro, VT, “Shared Inspiration” 2002 Gallery in the Woods, Marlboro, VT, “Group Exhibition”

1998 Kunst und Technik, 2-3 Monbijoustrasse, Berlin 1998 L Gallery, 26 Octyabrskaya St. Moscow, Russia 1997 The Ridge Street Gallery, NYC, “La Grande Salon” 1997 The Tunnel, NYC, “Vision 21 Series” 1990 The San Francisco Art Institute, “Group Invitational” AWARDS/PRESENTATIONS 2008 Finalist: ART OF ACTION. The Vermont Arts Council is collaborating with philanthropist Lyman Orton to commission ten visual artists to create suites of artwork that address issues identified by Vermonters as essential to the state’s future. 2004 Vermont Arts Council, National Endowment of the Arts “Creation Grant” 2003 Robert Hull Fleming Museum, Burlington, VT Slide presentation: “The Anthropomorphic Machine” 2003 The Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, Brattleboro, VT Slide presentation: “Spirited Women at Work” 2003 National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. From the States program, “Finalist” 2002 “New Directions ’02, 18th Annual Juried Competition” Barrett Art Center, Poughkeepsie, NY

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