“Axis Gallery is pleased to present Axis Mundi, an exhibition of paintings by Molly Champlin and Mirabel Wigon. This show brings together two California artists that make work informed by their immediate environment. Though ultimately motivated by an embodied engagement with paint, they utilize a variety of processes ranging from collage, appropriate imagery, and digital photogrammetry to explore mirroring, rejuvenation, and cultivation. Axis Mundi is the sacred center where cosmic forces meet at the navel of the world. This exhibition features the meeting and mirroring of earth to sky. At its epicenter, we find a world within a world, a visually decadent space of rejuvenescence, respite, and promising futures.
Join us for our Second Saturday Reception on January 11th, 2025 from 5-8pm.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Molly Champlin is an artist and educator whose abstract paintings activate the boundaries of the virtual and the real, of human and machine. With a distinct style that incorporates glitches, abstraction, and a painterly devotion to light and color, Champlin delves into the metaphysical traces that linger in both digital and physical landscapes, exploring the consequences of dromology, that is the world and reality as a result of velocity. Champlin has exhibited in group shows across the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and internationally in Japan. She received the Kleefeld Scholarship, the Nell O. Fog Endowed Scholarship, and the Cal Alumni Association Leadership Award. She holds a BA in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Long Beach. She teaches at Cal State Long Beach and lives in the San Gabriel Valley.
Mirabel Wigon is a northern California artist residing in the greater Sacramento area. She creates landscape paintings grappling with phenomena informed by her immediate environment. These paintings explore notions of progress, instability, and system collapse as catalysts toward a speculative future that fosters co-dependency and resilience. Her works have been featured in numerous regional and national exhibitions. In the summer of 2024, she was an artist in residence at Vermont Studio Center. She received a 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.”
Link to Axis Gallery website: https://axisgallery.org/home/exhibitions/axis-mundi/
