Jessica Silverman in San Francisco opens today “Catherine Wagner: Reel to Real,” the San Francisco-based artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Reel to Real features two bodies of work that restage physical sites of our collective imaginations. These include Wagner’s new series Moving Pictures, exploring the film archive at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), alongside never-before-seen photographs from Architecture of Reassurance, her historic 1995 series capturing Disney theme parks in Anaheim, Orlando, Paris, and Tokyo. These curious and often humorous images confront enchantments promised by the twentieth century’s most iconic visual landscapes. Through Wagner’s lens, “Reel to Real” takes us behind the scenes, lifting the curtain on cinematic smoke and mirrors.
Wagner’s decades-long conceptual practice is characterized by striking photographs. Their formal rigor and chromatic precision evoke history painting and still lifes, while carefully conceived compositions reveal the artist’s play with her subject matter. Over the past 45 years, she has photographed genetics labs, museum storage, and classrooms. Her most recent body of work looks to the Pacific Film Archive, one of the last few analog film repositories in the United States. Granted rare access to this extensive collection, Wagner rearranged its contents. She curated stacks of film canisters by color, word association and intuition, composing novel narratives in each photograph. For example, the artist cleverly combines a mid-century musical, rom-com, and thriller in How to: Save a Marriage/Make a Monster/Succeed in Business (2024).
In History of Cinema I and II (both 2024), floor-to-ceiling metal shelves lined with film reels disappear into the depths of archival storage. The images create a sense of totality: a universe where collective fantasies reside within silver and rainbow-colored towers of film canisters. Visualizing material storage is humanizing. Though we imagine our cumulative images and videos stored in an ethereal cloud, digital repositories are in fact expansive warehouses of computers.
Mickey Mouse ears soar to meet the clouds in Wagner’s photograph Spirit In The Sky (1995/2025). Like a deity over Orlando, they materialize whimsy and Disney’s global influence. Part of Architecture of Reassurance, the black and white image strips away the pastel hues of Disneyland’s iconic landscapes to uncover the architectural and corporatized frameworks upholding archetypes.
“Reel to Real” examines how our dreams are constructed and maintained. A meditation on moving image, Wagner deconstructs the systems that configure and idealize cultural narratives. She responds to the impossibility of objectivity by inviting us to reimagine what magic really is.
Catherine Wagner : Reel to Real
February 27 – April 5, 2025
Jessica Silverman
621 Grant Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94108
https://jessicasilvermangallery.com/
