Crystal Wagner

Description

Iris Elementum, the work created by the American Crystal Wagner for the Urban Art Biennale 2022, is an origami sculpture as a microcosm—garishly colorful, deliberately artificial and commercial, in a kind of aquarium or artificial atmosphere. Which also evokes—to reverse the perspective—the field of vision in an astronaut’s or deep-sea diver’s helmet. Or an eye. In art, as we know, everything is not only in the eye of the beholder, as the somewhat hackneyed adage goes, but in the eye of the artist. “Exotic flora and fauna, micro- and macro-organisms and the entire rhizomatic growth of all living things” as a “natural (form) language” create the source of inspiration for Wagner’s structures and textures. On these, the former art professor, who has moved on from teaching, makes her plants thrive. What functions like digital graphic explosions is hand-crafted down to the very last detail. Cell structures and tissue intertwine in Wagner’s installations, in so doing forming entities that are seemingly mutating energetically. In the graffiti genre, you’d probably call this “Wild Style.”