Summer Wagner
Summer Wagner
015 - Summer Wagner
48 Page
softcover
21cm x 16cm
2023
Published by Setanta Books
About the Book:
015 - Summer Wagner is the fifteenth in an ongoing Bi-Monthly series publishing the work of emerging photographers.
"Imagine you’re asleep, time and space don’t hold the weight they normally do, they feel…less dense, changeable. Much of my work is a body of visual poems contemplating the way in which we experience consciousness, both linearly and all at once. Linear, as individuals in our own ongoing play…and all at once, as a collective projection of a complex system of conscious beings. Alone, we project our egos into the ether (or onto Twitter, Instagram or TikTok), together those egos dance in an eclectic circus above our heads and reflect dimly on each others faces.
Linear we walk our paths unable to turn around through time…All at once we build our network, a vast web of information - remember what you did on this day 2 years ago? How about 10 years ago? In a picture from 2012 you’re still wondering where Kony is on an endless loop.
And where one web ends, another begins."
Book review by Liz Larsen |
Before you open Summer Wagner, you are met with a striking teal cover. A blue snake-like line twirls over and around itself, looping and disappearing off the page. This simple illustration starts the wonderful journey of this book. The design is unassuming—linear, yet this swooping tangle, this endless loop speaks to the artist’s dissection of consciousness. The push and pull of ego, the looming ether, and the blurred line where an individual is both a singular entity and an expanding collective—simultaneously.
Each image is tethered to the next. The color story is rich, cohesive, and eerie. There is a chemical glow across the pictures. A pulsating, reflective green that trails through the pages, highlighting obscured faces and silhouettes.
The placement of light within each photograph dictates where the viewer’s eye falls, demanding the focus on moments of concentrated light before the rest of the image can develop. At times, the presence of technology becomes blinding, the screen light seeming almost sinister. The experience captured feels like the desire of ego. A want that falls short further disconnecting people from one another.
This project has a feeling of suspension. It straddles consciousness and tangibility. What do we worship? What deserves our attention? These were questions Summer Wagner made me consider. The current online landscape exists between reality and a manufactured existence. A state of conscious experience that is split, neither fully in one dimension, but dissonant all the same. A feedback loop of dissatisfaction.
Through the book, I felt a sensation that something had been halted. The figures, stoic, feel untethered in the frame. Ghostly as they visibly fade into their surroundings. It is as if the subjects are beneath a veil, trapped in a state of liminality. There is an exploration of tangibility occurring. What is real? What is invented? In many images, something or someone is fading. There is a loss that we the viewer are made privy to, yet the specifics of what is lost are concealed to us. There is a softness and a tightness. An intimacy and an aloofness. We are shown that two things can exist at once. That nothing ends.
