Axis Gallery is pleased to present Cementation/Dissolution, an exhibition of landscape paintings by Mirabel Wigon. These paintings are inspired by her immediate surroundings and explore experience, immersion, and separation within the built and natural environment. The paintings acknowledge infrastructure instability and ecological degradation as dire existential threats, emphasizing the flawed modernist narrative of progress and innovation.

Wigon’s work utilizes the landscape and environmental phenomena as a metaphor for catharsis amid tumultuous instability. Upon returning to the San Joaquin Valley, she was particularly informed by the fires and floods afflicting Central California and the large expanse of sky and land. The paintings depict vast sky spaces where pyrocumulus cloud formations dominate a grid of winding rivers. She writes, “The landscape is a stage for the drama of human activity. Painting is a container, a conglomeration of material signs that act as iconographic representations of a particular historic moment. Through these paintings, I explore my place and space, questioning modernist notions of progress and reflecting on the inherent instability and uncertainty in a world where what may seem stable is at the brink of collapse.”

The paintings are imagined and constructed landscapes, fractured and unstable, where visual elements are repeated, fragmented, and coalesce through various painting strata. She states, “The paintings are a product of the continual accumulation of visual materials in ideation, source material, and painting surface. I like the idea that painting is an act which records time and this material of paint, which is basically colored mud, can allude to geologic time through its properties and layering. Through various methods of obfuscation, representations come in and out of clarity on the painting’s surface. The paintings themselves live somewhere in-between stability and precarity.” The work contends with various painting languages of abstraction, naturalism, digital codes, and diagrammatic schemes to layer representations of a place, resulting in a compounded view. The paintings’ surface complexity thus defines an understating of space, place, and depth in a world where the conception of space and place is built, spatially shallow, and highly curated.

Cementation/Dissolution features a series of work highly informed by the American Landscape painting tradition, but rather than perpetuate notions of expansion, colonization, and man’s triumph over nature, Wigon hopes to subvert Romantic Kantian notions of the sublime and ideals of beauty. Rather than exalt in the power of the “rational” subjugation of the natural, we embrace the notion that we do not have control and must first accept that infrastructure instability, and subsequent environmental degradation, is inherently tied to the desire to dominate and innovate.