Untitled

Merrill Wagner, who came of age as an artist in the 1960s, works across the categories of painting, sculpture, and installation. Over the course of her long career, she has consistently engaged a wide range of subjects, including landscape (both urban and natural), materiality, duration, metamorphosis, and abstraction. Wagner employs both natural and industrial materials, most of them either reclaimed and/or originally intended for extra-artistic purposes. Such is true of Untitled, which exemplifies the artist’s longstanding fascination with slate (and geological material generally). It consists of two pieces of slate, both readymade, which hang on the wall in a carefully determined relationship to one another. The pieces, sourced from different places, are different colors, textures, and forms. Irregular in shape, with uneven edges and geometries, they were likely "designed" or "composed" not by the artist, but by the vagaries of their former lives. The artist’s intervention was to have found and then combined them to create a single work of art. The piece of slate that hangs at the left appears to be a piece of broken chalkboard: it is probably one of the dozens of such pieces that Wagner collected from PS.1 when it was decommissioned as a school and remade into the art space now known as PS.1 MoMA. Wagner chose to retain evidence of her materials’ past lives in the form of tape residue on the piece on the left and pre-drilled holes on the piece on the right.