September 21st – October 9th 2018
Michael Wegerer was the winner of our 5th International Open Submission Print Show and brought a selection of new cyantotype and screen print works for his exhibition Light Traces of Geometry.
In his diverse oeuvre, Michael Wegerer deals with the investigation of cultural and historical perceptions of text, images and data. Influenced by contemporary philosophy, media theory and popular culture, he uses digital or printed media, found everyday objects, statistics and written records as sources of his work.
In his current cycle of works “Utopia-Ocean”, he takes up the discourse on the use of digital data and media images in art production. During a 4-week stay at Wharepuke, Michael developed sketches and a new body of work for prints on glass.
The exhibition included silk-screens of scanned sky-light and expressive cyanotypes on tissue paper. The series is combined for the first time with screen-printed geometric shapes and repeat pattern. The geometric shapes in Wegerer’s screen-prints contain compressed information – data from different, often medial, sources. His way of processing can be described as visual translation, a creative sampling in times of massive and excessive dissemination of information of different quality and origin.
Michael Wegerer’s cyanotypes, with images from daily newspapers, everyday objects and motifs from Thomas Morus’ Utopia, poetically address the questions of the social models of the ideal as well as their shortcomings.The cyanotypes revive the process of the iron blueprint developed in 1839, a photographic processing technique that was later used in architectural offices in the form of blueprints. The natural scientist Anna Atkins was the first to master this process with her highly aesthetic plant photographs – and thus also the first photographer in history – who, however, did not receive the recognition she deserved at the time.
In his introduction to the book: “Bouncing Borders – Michael Wegerer“, 2016, Derek Michael Besant, RCA, writes:
“In the art concepts generated by Michael Wegerer, there are the adaptations taken directly from public places, like the ladder, the bus stop, the train station… which invite a reconsideration of things we think we already ‘know or understand’. His basic act of ‘taking the impressions’ from these 3D objects that occupy real space, constructing a paper-like skin that is peeled off the structures, and reconstructed as ghosts of themselves, embraces his brilliant and poetic nature of the act of ‘seeing’.
Wegerer’s work stops us in the crowded train station, to doubt, if only for a moment. Then the desire within his work, changes how we regard the things and space around us in new ways. His interests in public space are where I believe the core of his work resides ultimately. He is curious enough to situate his work in conditions of alteration, where the public is able to rethink their acceptance of the way things are perceived. This publication documents some of his current and past directions and points to new islands of thought to ponder anew…”
Michael Wegerer’s web site