Catherine Wagner

Moving Pictures

2024

Granted access to the film archive at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), I explore the history of cinema as a barometer of civilization through the physical rearrangement of archival content. By curating stacks of film canisters by color, word association, and intuition, I compose novel narratives in each photograph, drawing on the textual interplay between inscribed film titles and their role as cultural hieroglyphics. In mining archival stacks containing films of varied distributions, I construct compositions which recontextualize history while evoking mnemonic responses to the past. 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. Shifting away from the notion of the ethereal digital cloud, this work proposes a visualization of material storage.

REEL TO REAL: SOLO EXHIBITION AT JESSICA SILVERMAN GALLERY

Reel to Real examines how our dreams are constructed and maintained. A meditation on the moving image, I deconstruct the systems that configure and idealize cultural narratives. By responding to the impossibility of objectivity, I invite audiences to observe restagings of physical sites which shape our collective imagination.

Press release courtesy of Third Eye Collective and Jessica Silverman Gallery.

Catherine Wagner: Reel to Real