Deluge
2023, Oil on canvas, 48"x60"
Root Rot
2023, Oil on paper mounted on panel, 20" x 24"
Twilight Shelter
2023, Oil on canvas mounted on panel, 16"x20"
Axis Gallery is pleased to present Hollow Veil, an exhibition of landscape paintings by Mirabel Wigon. These paintings question experience, immersion, and separation in an encapsulated world. This “world”, situated within the confines of the canvas, is a contrived unreality. Pristine and seemingly tranquil views are interrupted and broken, the surface image veiling a hollow depth. The paintings ask us to consider the potential growth from decay and the desire to control disorder.
Wigon’s work utilizes various strategies to impede, encapsulate, reflect, and cast doubt within seemly benign natural spaces. In Kant’s critique of Judgement, a sequence of statements illustrates paintings’ connection with gardening. “Painting, as the second kind of formative art, which presents sensible appearance in artful combination with ideas, I would divide into that of the beautiful depiction of nature, and that of the beautiful arrangement of its products. The first is painting proper, the second landscape gardening.” The attitudes regarding the act of gardening as a fine art came to fruition within the Western Canon as a “perfect” model which imitates nature. Jacques Ranciere states in The Time of the Landscape, On the Origins of the Aesthetic Revolution, “Like painting, the art of gardening is an art of appearances that imitates appearances…gardening belongs to the fine arts because what it produces are in fact artificial appearances.” Hollow Veil is a series of works that act as imperfect depictions of natural spaces. As historical landscape paintings or gardens have exemplified humanity’s mastery over nature, what tends to be denied in these sorts of curated spaces are the cycles of destruction, decay, and rebirth. The works in Hollow Veil provoke us to grapple with these cycles.
Artist Bio
Mirabel Wigon is an artist residing in the San Joaquin Valley of California. She creates large-scale landscape paintings that grapple with environmental phenomena resulting from, and related to, the built landscape. These paintings 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 Cementation/Dissolution at Axis Gallery in Sacramento, CA; Fragments at Strata Gallery in Santa Fe, NM; New Voices at the Jacki Headley University Art Gallery in Chico, California; Shifting Ground at the Michael Stearns Gallery in San Pedro, CA; Made in California at Brea Gallery in Brea, CA; and Painted 2021: 5th Biennial Survey at Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio. 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.