William Traver Gallery
Seattle
Merrill Wagner has lived in New York since 1953, but grew up in and still spends part of each summer near Tacoma, Washington, She followed her 1997 Tacoma Art Museum retrospective with this recent Seattle showing of three large-scale, painted slate sculptures. Mostly known as a Minimalist painter of the Sol LeWitt generation in New York, her status as a sculptor has been overlooked.
Mass and volume were among the first things that many Minimalists dispensed with despite the fact that Minimalism was largely identified as a sculptural style. Wagner’s decade-long series of paintings on steel sheets held to the wall with strong magnets provides some clues for her encounters with three dimensions. Even at their flattest, her works are still not about conventional materials or occupation of volumetric space. Replacing the canvas support meant finding other surfaces such as found slate chalk boards, steel, and aluminum. But long before the wall-mounted paintings, Wagner was re-thinking placement, site, and that crucial Minimalist pedestal-the floor with a series of painted piles of rocks and building site detritus in works like Terrain #3 (1985).
The new work extends explorations of how sculpture can bridge the gap between a painting on a wall and an object on the floor; by leaning against the wall. As early as Wolf Point (1987), Wagner was stressing informality of positioning for sculpture. Eighteen feet wide, the numerous small jagged slate pieces resembled a mountain range.
In Standing Figures (1998), any landscape association is truncated by the flat tops of each slab. Five tall slate fragments are set side by side, portions of which are then painted in various tones of blue. With the imperfections of the slate surfaces showing through the paint, the effect is topographical rather than painterly.
Lower to the ground at three feet high, the five flat stone elements of Benfon (1998) take on the appearance of an altered architectural ruin or abandoned house foundation. Much of Wagner’s art has taken its cue from the aftermath of construction sites in Manhattan, redeeming the throwaways of the Big Apple and stressing, in a West Coast way, the importance of recycling materials.
Soar (1998) returns to the wall. With the slate now mounted on the wall in place of steel, the ten-foot-wide strips are painted horizontally, again in contrasting blue stripes. Denying the weight and solidity of the leaners, Soar appears to levitate, albeit somewhat improbably. A tour de force, it lacks the link to gravity that defines the sculptural status of Benton and Standing Figures.
Although classic Minimalism did not leave an awful lot of room to maneuver, Wagner has long excelled at literally working in between the cracks, the interstices of the allowed and the forbidden. She makes sculptures out of paintings and vice versa. She introduces color where it was banished. She sets up systems such as the encyclopedic range of commercially available blue paints, only to undercut them when intuition calls for it.
Finally, her content straddles the urban world and the natural. ln New York, the slate and rubble refer to the poetry of the sidewalk; but in Seattle, the slate and stone take on organic and landscape references. The informality of placement and the gleaming and matte painted surfaces have softened Minimalism, allowing in a glimmer of personal expression, along with the bigger surrounding world.
-Matthew Kangas
