Peter Wegner

Words V

2007

Wegner was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He earned his BA at Yale University. He works in multiple media, ranging from paintings and photography to large-scale installations and wall works. Systems The first theme is the idea of systems and their hidden inadequacies. As architectural scholar Noah Chasin wrote in a 2007 essay, Systems often make appearances in Wegner's work to suggest the potential for order, yet the artist continually exposes them as means of introducing disorder… [H]e systematically questions their foundations from within so that the very integrity of each system's signifying capacity is compromised…. Wagner'ss official bio states that "[h]e often works between conventional categories, creating sculpting, paintings, painterly installations, and architectural photographs." However, Chasin advises viewers to see this aspect of the artist's approach as a constructive rather than a destructive one: “We should not conclude that Wegner’s subversion eliminates meaning but instead that it draws our attention to the way that meaning is created and naturalized.” Color Professor, author, and critic Eve Meltzer noted in a 2002 review that “color may be the… center” of his entire practice. Poet and essayist John Koethe also described Wegner as "obsessed with color." The artist first began deconstructing the subject in the late 1990s with his "Remarks on Color" series, which used commercial paint chip samples as their starting point. Wagner's color-based "D65" series, begun in 2014, takes its title from "the standard scientific shorthand for the color of daylight, roughly 6500 degrees Kelvin" and is "inspired by sunlight in California," according to Wegner. More than a decade earlier, Meltzer linked his use of color with market mechanisms. She wrote of the paint chip works that "...there is always the problem of capital and its ideological effects. After all the paint chip is an advertising tool—a ploy to make a buck on a dream. Wegner's work makes these systems palpable, not through barefaced institutional critique, but by quietly elbowing some room into their rigid structures or—as he says in his book The Other Today Is the One You Want by opening up the space between the lines’ and pushing back the horizon.’" Language A third theme identified in Wegner's work is language. Meltzer writes that Wegner's paint chip pieces beg the question: “How can so many shades of red claim the same name when, clearly, language’s system of difference can’t fracture fast enough or splinter small enough to cover the range?” In a 2007 essay, Henriette Huldisch observed that Wegner “repeatedly invokes language specifically to create associations, to link his works back to the world of ideas and things from which they originated: systems of classification, names of places, and the incidental items of our daily lives (rulers, billboards, contracts, and so on).”