ArtShow with artist Mirabel Wigon

On this episode of ArtShow, artist Mirabel Wigon talks with host Craig Stover about her life and art. Mirabel talks about her start in the arts, her interest in her environment and her process for making new art. She also talks about what sparks her creativity, her use of source materials and how she begins each studio session with very specific rituals.
In Mirabel's own words: The world we live in is contingent on, and influenced by, massively unpredictable systems that define an understanding of space, place, and depth. My paintings are a conglomeration of signs, where the accumulation of imagery and painted layers creates a perplexing and tenuous notion of the “whole” built from many discrete fragments of perception. Technological systems mediate a vast amount of information which shapes the conception of space. These systems alter one’s experience of space through accumulation, imbalance, and overload, resulting in opulence teetering at the edge of collapse. The opulence visible in my practice explores experience, immersion, and separation within my immediate environment. I create landscape paintings that contend with environmental phenomena and the built environment. The paintings acknowledge infrastructure instability and ecological degradation as dire existential threats, emphasizing the flawed modernist narrative of progress and innovation.
The work contends with various painting languages of abstraction, naturalism, digital codes, and diagrammatic schemes to layer representations of a place, resulting in a compounded view. The paintings’ surface complexity is a product of continual accumulation of visual imagery and materials. The scenes depicted in my paintings are contradictions, where form and gesture take on multiple aspects. The incongruously held together forms allude to the instability inherent in our environment. The work has evolved from overt messages relating to the disparaging of energy production and distribution, to utilizing the landscape and environmental phenomena as a metaphor for catharsis amid tumultuous instability. In the most recent work, an event predicates a transcendental experience in the face of the sublime. In the wake of uncertainty, I long for a reconciliatory stance and dream for a stable future. The work aims to coalesce a colossal amount of contradictory information to create a nebulous space in the work, amplifying anxieties, yet offering hope in the face of uncertainty.
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