Double Take – Peter Foucault, Erin Kaczkowski, Justin Nunnally, Mirabel Wigon, Danielle Wogulis

Double Take consists of work exploring a range of strategies from diagrammatic mapping of spatial systems to ambiguously encoded signs, considering different means of storing and recognizing information. The featured artists are new members of Axis Gallery who produce radically different work that share fundamental reflections on human memory and learning. At first glance, the selected works seem to be a reflection on the quotidian. However, upon closer inspection, they are metacognitive exercises that consider the functions of perception, cognition, and memory.

Memory and perception fundamentally differ. Image-making (object-making) is an intentional interpretation of memory. Perception is the act of seeing from one vantage point, while memory is conflated with other associations. Imagination is a “what if” proposition, a suspension of disbelief, a tool from which we can conserve both memory and perception in an object. Through form, material, and our various processes, we are all encoding, marking, and making new associations; a sort of roadmap for the viewer to consider the accumulation of thought and action.

The strategies between works vary, but accumulation of material and the juxtaposition of elements to create an internal perplexity is shared. Danielle’s work explores biological processes and their relation to current events, social systems, and how the body experiences the world around it. Mirabel’s work considers how painted space grapples with multiple sensory stimuli coalescing into, and onto, the flat painted space through a variety of painting languages to explore experience, immersion, and separation with space and place. Erin uses collage and assemblage to explore material, memory, and new associations. Peter uses the print matrix to highlight the liminal space between systems and how two separate systems act upon each other to create new experiences. Justin’s works challenge the viewer to consider perception most directly, confusing our position between object and two-dimensional image to consider human sight and cognition (recognition).

Artist Bios

Peter Foucault creates works on paper, videos, and installations that are fueled by his love of drawing and mark making. He has created a series of Drawing-Projects, which utilize systems he developed that produce complex abstract compositions. At the root of these projects is a constant tension between control and the loss of control. His work is concept driven, and often utilizes objects that reference printmaking and multiplicities. In addition to his own practice, he is the Co-Founder of the Mobile Arts Platform (MAP), a Social Practice artmaking and curatorial team that creates interactive installations that directly engage the public. 

Foucault has participated in exhibitions at venues such as the Getty Museum and Getty Villa, Oakland Museum of California, Torrance Art Museum, California Museum, San Luis Obispo Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Smithsonian Institutes’ Freer and Sackler Gallery. He has received funding from the California Arts Council, Creative Work Fund, Wattis Family Foundation, the City of San Jose Public Art Program, the City of Oakland’s Cultural Funding Program, US Bank, the Seattle Center Foundation, Puffin Foundation, Valley Medical Center Foundation, and the Zellerbach Family Foundation.

Foucault’s work has been reviewed in People Magazine, KQED Arts, The San Francisco Chronicle, The SF Weekly, ArtWeek, Wired Magazine, KTVU Fox News, ABC 7 News, CBS Bay Area News, and Artnet Magazine.

For the Newish Works by Newish Axis Gallery Members Exhibition (or title TBA) Foucault is showing a new collection of prints from his Remix Series, artworks where the artist digitally photographs details from his large-scale ink on paper drawings and translates them into individual screen print layers, overprinting and re-organizing them into new compositions much like a DJ mixing records and creating new beats. The original drawings reference maps, systems and networks and these Remixes continue in this vein combining, overlapping and re-annexing the paper space on a macro scale. This is a new system Foucault has created and each new “Sample” is different based on the order of screen, orientation and color. Through this series the artist has created an archive of screens that can be selected and printed to make a new mix.

Erin Kaczkowski’s current paintings use collage as the conceptual and formal structure for her work to explore broad themes of loss, fragmentation, memory, and obfuscation. As a visual artist rooted in a studio-based practice, her work is often an intuitive expression of psychological experiences emerging from the complex relationship we all navigate between photography and reality. She uses materials including resin casts, oil paint, collage and found objects. 

Originally from Wisconsin, Erin Kaczkowski studied both fine art and social work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison before attending the Yale School of Art for her graduate degree in 2009. For nearly a decade she taught painting, drawing and art history at colleges across California, making her home in the desert outside of Mojave, Los Angeles and most recently Sacramento. She was a resident artist at Verge Center for the Arts from 2018-2022. Currently, Erin works in the Sacramento Public Library system where she loves, among many things, helping to connect people with digital services. 

Justin Nunnally is a visual artist whose experimental work deconstructs and reveals unseen or ignored modes of visual understanding across mediums. The last decade of his practice has been dedicated to understanding and confronting the unchallenged philosophies of perception. He has created installations that can only be activated through flash photography, crafted contemporary cinematic fantasies that present the visceral reality of climate change, and created sculptures that challenge the viewer to question the difference between the physical object and the two-dimensional art image.

Justin Nunnally holds an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design and a BA in Screenwriting and Economics from Loyola Marymount University. In 2020 he was visiting artist at the École nationale supérieure d'arts de Paris Cergy, with residency at the Centre Les Récollets in Paris.

Mirabel Wigon is an artist residing in California. She creates landscape paintings grappling with environmental phenomena resulting from, and related to, the built landscape. Her work contents with the mediated experience of space by using various painting languages of abstraction, naturalism, digital codes, and diagrammatic schemes to reconcile states of real and simulated. Fractured space, shifting screens, and atmospheric conditions obfuscate and interrupt the viewer while simultaneously offering new visual pathways to explore notions of progress, instability, and system collapse. Her works have been featured in numerous group exhibitions both regionally and nationally. Her recent work has been exhibited in Shifting Ground at the Michael Stearns Gallery, Made in California at Brea Gallery, and Painted 2021: 5th Biennial Survey at Manifest Gallery. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Traditional Art from California State University, East Bay and her Master of Fine Arts in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Long Beach. She is currently Assistant Professor of Art at California State University, Stanislaus where she teaches drawing and painting. 

Danielle Wogulis is a two-dimensional artist based in Sacramento, California. She primarily works in oil and acrylic paint, as well as collage and cut paper. She explores the human body as a site of expression, using figurative and botanical subjects to find the dreamlike in the mundane: sinister plants, inanimate objects that evoke a sense of ritualistic symbolism, etc. She’s interested in the absurdity and tension created by the inseparability of our corporeal realities and our knowledge of the world and ourselves.

Danielle received a BA in painting from UC Santa Barbara in 2014 and spent a year studying at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. She currently lives and works in Sacramento.