WORK — Angela White Wenger

Webs

In this body of work, I gather, preserve, and distribute the silk- and line-work of Pacific Northwestern orb weaver spiders. Making beautiful, functional and wearable forms on a historically "royal" material, I encourage daily, interactive reflection on the majesty of spiders.

I seek to decenter the human and imagine a humanity that cherishes all species. I work against representations in dominant media of spiders as dangerous and of women as irrationally afraid. Cumulatively, these trace fossils of the silk works of orb weavers make up a growing dataset. Sometimes, I think they are bound for a dystopian future of ecological collapse and global extinction. Amid the ruins, these sacred shards remain.

Other times, I think I am from a utopian future. I came back in time to help make it come true. I am prefiguring it now by loving spiders.

Water

Using a mobile darkroom, I gather water in its various forms on transparent plates and use those to create photograms to document shapes and densities in shades of gray. I generate records of rain, fog, mist, dew and frost. This practice fosters a personal meditation on water and grows a photographic dataset of atmospheric conditions.

American Fog

In the work, "American Fog," I take portraits of rain, fog and dew that I gathered as photograms and use the organic shapes within those portraits to reconfigure, re-shape, reform, deconstruct or re-face American currency. The consequent objects propose a new value. Money is a way to power and a source of conflict. In these works, money--previously trapped in a continuous and tumultuous cycle of circulation--assumes the stillness of gathered and/or fallen water.

American Fog, SFCC, 2017, 8 x 20 feet, detail

Sound

I use empty record players to provide silent, patterned motion to a site-specific network, or ecology, of threads and artifacts. I tune the ecology to compose algorithmic poetry and music, as the artifacts and the histories they hold stir and sway, sounding, when they meet, in spatialized dyads and chords of resonant frequencies. Among other things, these instruments transform record players from tools for the repetition of past sounds into agents for the generative creation of present and future sounds.

More Than Concrete, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 2008

More Than Concrete, 2008, Shoshana Wayne Gallery

More Than Concrete, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 2008

Always A Pleasure, Greg Kucera Gallery, 2007

Always A Pleasure, Greg Kucera Gallery, 2007