of dirt and silt and branch and bone | Brian Wagner

5-FOOT SHOWS: Isabel Chavier, Pam Carberry, Conor McGrann

Windows:  Brian Wagner and Jonathan Gomez-Whitney

Primarily a Lithographer and Book Artist, Wagner’s work focuses on the queer existence and memory. These densely-layered and rendered lithographs explore the tenderness, loneliness, acceptance, and gentle anger of queerness, grief, and healing. These prints and writings consider the physical and emotional spaces of love, hurt, trauma, and remembrance of relationships in the forms of drawn landscapes and queer symbolism of the day-to-day life of a queer person. The emphasis on rural landscape, bird flocks, and fragmented spaces is a nod to the migratory nature of queer life and love, and the act of taking up space but never as much as queer people need; the constant movement for a partner or self preservation, and the trauma of queer love inherently impacted by external and internal forces.

Additionally, with the multiplicity of lithography and print, the existence of multiple impressions stands-in as a quiet reminder of queer populace. The physicality and technique-heavy act of the process works as both a creative outlet and place of being, furthering their work’s emphasis in grief and healing.