PORTFOLIO Conceptual photographer Catherine Wagner.

WHEN LIGHT BULBS GO OFF

Conceptual photographer Catherine Wagner doesn’t just chase the light.

CATHERINE WAGNER, the award-winning San Francisco conceptual artist whose 1978 photographic images of a still-forming Moscone Center will soon be incised into the granite walls of the new Yerba Buena/Moscone subway station near SFMOMA, says in her latest book, Catherine Wagner: Place, History and the Archive, that “photography presents the opportunity to view the world in the way Jorge Luis Borges and the magical realists write about it — as something more.”

In other words, a photographic image, Wagner suggests, is like a single moment that implies a past and also a future. It is an archaeological fragment floating in time, waiting to be interpreted.

Documenting the development of the neighborhood around the Moscone Center over a five-year period during the ’70s was “archaeology in reverse,” she says, because she was witnessing the layering of history beginning with a skeletal infrastructure.

As Shoair Mavlian, director of Photoworks UK, writes about Wagner’s four-decade career in the book, Wagner’s “cornerstone themes include the architecture of public space, the framework of leisure time, our private space, educational structures and the delivery and transmission of knowledge, history, archives and the museum, and the underlying presence of science and technology.”

Represented by the Anglim Gilbert Gallery in San Francisco and widely exhibited in the Bay Area and throughout the United States, Japan and Europe, Wagner also considers each exhibition design as a component of her art and meticulously sets the stage. She paints walls and backdrops, adds props and controls lighting for atmospheric

Top: A still life composed of vintage light bulbs from Wagner’s 2006 photo series A Narrative History of the Light Bulb. Above: From the 2005 series called Re-Classifying History, which documents accidental juxtapositions of crated sculptures at the de Young Museum. Left: “Delilah Back.”

“readings” of the framed images hanging on the walls, which ultimately are protagonists in an unending play: time.

Perhaps the complex structural buildup for each show reflectsWagner’s ongoing preoccupations: architecture and culture. Home and Other Stories, shown in 1993 at LACMA, consisted of triptych images of the domestic environments of strangers. In her essay in the book, Mavlian suggests the triptychs also present a sanitized version of life, as tightly edited Facebook or social media posts do today.

Wagner’s catchy titles are also like the tips of icebergs filled with content.

One set of images of books written in Braille was titled trans/literate to indicate what the artist was thinking.

“Braille publishing was going away because of technology and blind people had to rely on audiobooks. Reading is the foundation of how we construct ideas — even abstract ideas,” Wagner says. “By documenting this I wanted to talk about the politics of how knowledge gets transferred.”

Another set of images depicting the history of medical splints presumably for wounded soldiers was poignantly called Reparations. The accidental jumble of crated artworks and furniture when the de Young museum was moving from its old building to make room for its new one was photographed for a 2005 exhibition called Re-Classifying History.

At the Baltimore Museum of Industry, Wagner found a collection of vintage light bulbs and used them to create a series of Morandiesque still-lifes titled A Narrative History of the Light Bulb. In the series, one image dubbed Lamps of 1900 was of bulbs from that period; another grouping called Utopia deliberately mixed bulbs from different periods; blue bulbs titled Ode to Yves honored the artist Yves Klein. “I made diffeent narratives from these installations,” Wagner explains. Thenarratives loosely tracked the invention and the history of the light bulb, but the bulbs also served as metaphors for parallel histories of that time.

Coming full circle, Archaeology in Reverse, Wagner’s most recent exhibition at Mills College in Oakland, where she has taught photography for three decades, was a collaborative site-specificinstallation with architects Nicholas de Monchaux and Kathryn Moll as well as choreographer Molissa Fenley, her colleague and a professor of dance at Mills.

“It cut into new territory yet cycled back to my earliest engagement with architecture and construction at Moscone. At the Mills College Art Museum, photography interfaced with existing architecture,” Wagner says.

For the exhibition, she exposed the museum’s usually concealed glass-roofed skylight with the use of periscopes that reveal hidden elements within the rafters. Photographs of repaired or altered sections of the building and views from doors and loading docks that had been covered over for half a century form “apertures” to the

Top: Wagner’s 2013 series trans/literate includes images of Braille books including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller that are being replaced by audiobooks. Bottom: Another still life from A Narrative History of the Light Bulb.

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londonfireplaceshoppe.com 415.380.0336 Mill Valley, CA together the money to send her, and it changed her life. “I learned everything about art, and I just became fascinated,” she says. “I had found my world.”

Tejada got her firstjob in Basque country, which was fraught with political turmoil at the time, then left for a position in Marbella, Spain, designing high-end kitchens for expensive mansions. She came to the U.S. in 1979 for personal reasons: she had fallen in love with an American. When she visited him they drove across the country, from Connecticut to San Francisco, and she fell in love all over again. “I felt like I had found my kingdom here,” she says. “I love the freedom, and the people from all over the world.” Even though she and her boyfriend broke up years later, Tejada remained in San Francisco. She married someone else, had two sons, and later divorced amicably.

But all the while she was definingthe Celia Tejada style, first as an interior designer and then as a fashion designer creating clothes under her own name (with Diane Moore). Her design house sold items to the likes of Barneys New York and I. Magnin. When the stock market tanked in the mid-’90s, though, her business struggled too. Thatwas when Gary Friedman, then the president of Williams Sonoma, approached her to start a design division for Pottery Barn.

At the time, Pottery Barn (owned by Williams Sonoma) mostly sold furniture from other manufacturers. As senior vice president of design and brand division, Tejada helped create the look for which Pottery Barn is known today: stylish casual living. She then helped do the same at Pottery Barn Kids and Pottery Barn Teen. In 2001, Friedman left for Corte Madera’s RH. Tejada joined him there in 2013.

The more Tejada became an American tastemaker, however, the more she longed for home. In 1999, she and her brother had bought property in Lake County and created a Spanish-style ranch there, Rancho Tejada, growing tempranillo and grenache grapes and making their own wine (which they sold, briefly). She also grew increasingly concerned about the “beautiful, forgotten valley” in Spain where she’d grown up. It was dying, and young people were leaving. So in 2016, she bought a mill house, built in 1670, and converted it to Molino Tejada, a luxurious inn.

Tejada designed the interiors there, including the common notes that appear in all of her properties: a mixture of high- and low-end furniture, antiques, lots of daybeds, tons of

Tejada purchased a Spanish mill house built in 1670 and converted it into Molino Tejada. She designed all the interiors using a mix of high- and low-end items.

pillows and fabulous kitchens. And, of course, she included dining room tables with benches — not chairs — because, she says, “I don’t want to limit the number of guests.” The table in the dining room in her childhood farmhouse, a room now located in the property’s former stables, seats 42.

Molino Tejada quickly drew the attention of publications such as Conde Nast Traveler, Vogue and Architectural Digest, and guests arrived from around the world. Tejada now envisions the inn as an arts and cultural center. Already, Spanish artists such as Adrian Ssegura and Okuda San Miguel have been in residence and created vivid outdoor murals.

It’s hard to imagine Tejada would have it otherwise. Her San Francisco home, its walls painted in gray, black or white, is an ode to art. One room brims with poetry books. Another with design and photography books. Another holds a home theater. “I love to be around writers, photographers, filmmakers and chefs,” she says.

Tha’s evident on Thursdaynights. Theeclectic, creative group she gathers is like family to her. She reads them Neruda, as they sit at the custom-made 15-foot table in her San Francisco dining room. Thetable is small by Tejada’s standards. It seats only 25. n

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HOME GROWN

Regional experts go for evergreens.

SAN FRANCISCO’S 1915

PANAMA-Pacific Inernational Exposition gave Italian sculptor Leo Lentelli, an assistant to an exposition officiawho was the father of sculptor Alexander Calder, the opportunity to create sculptural “water sprites” in its Court of Abundance. Lentelli also fashioned allegorical statues representing art, literature, philosophy, science and law for the city’s main library in 1918. Like his other works, those fie larger-thanlife cast stone library statues were not intended to last, but they’re still around, rescued at auction in 2004 by East Bay architects Lucia Howard and David Weinstein, whose company Piraneseum collects such decorative arts, some for sale. Now these Lentelli figues stand permanently on the edge of Howard and Weinstein’s circular evergreen garden in Lafayette, bordered by orange flwered Aloe arborescens succulents (not shown), large Brahea armata var. “clara” and small Chamaerops humilis var. “argentea” palms, Agave franzosinii agaves, and Miscanthus transmorrisonensis grasses.

The rich textural tableau reflects it creators: Howard and Weinstein (the latter happens to be maverick architect Charles Moore’s nephew) headed the postmodernist-oriented Oakland design firmAce Architects in the 1980s. And garden designer Margaret Majua, founder of Bay Retail Enterprises, a multistore company that sells whimsical souvenirs, belongs to an informal group of passionate horticulturists called — wait for it — the Hortisexuals. piraneseum.com; Bay Retail Enterprises, 510.610.2290