Re-made Garden: Ira Wagner

Paul Robeson Galleries, Rutgers University, Newark, 2016

In this photographic series titled Garden State, the artist Ira Wagner explores the industrial landscape of New Jersey. Documenting different areas familiar to many commuters passing through the Garden-State, these isolated places become remote from both their consciousness and body. In these photographs, Wagner captures factories, warehouses, abandon sites, public facilities, roads and bridges, seeking representations of development, decline and renewal. His photographs possess a spectral, unexpected beauty of industrial zones and desolate scenes, emphasizing the man-made altered landscape, where steel, smoke, and monumental structures dominate the composition, yet absent of humans. The light conditions appear soft and hazy, conjuring a sense of mystery and melancholy that is nevertheless romantic. In these carefully composed photographs, familiar objects and sceneries take on their own shape, evoking a surreal impression, such as the work Goethals Bridge, recalling De Chirico’s metaphysical landscapes and eerie cityscapes. Wagner’s photographic recording of the Garden-State follow the tradition of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typology of industrial archeology, and can also be seen as an extension to Robert Smithson’s 1967 The Monuments of Passaic, where crumbling structures and machineries he photographed around New Jersey, were regarded and treated as art installations. Each of Wagner’s images are carefully produced, with great attention given to angles and lighting, underscoring both their documentary and fictional qualities.