Peter Wegner
Terra Firma Incognita
Until 6 July 2008
30 the Octagon, Dunedin, New Zealand
+64 3 474 3240
dpagmail [at] dcc.govt.nz
Terra Firma Incognita is a monumental new work by American artist Peter Wegner that fully occupies the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s main 7 x 23 meter foyer wall. Each of 2,000 circular inkjet prints has been printed with an enlarged detail from a physical relief map of the world. Wegner rearranges these circular units in a radiating composition that suggests a range of metaphorical associations – a test used to determine color blindness, a physical explosion glimpsed in progress, a rising or setting sun.
In this new world order, everything is an island unto itself. Alliances are unpredictable and aesthetically opportunistic: a piece of New Zealand coastline next to Middle Eastern desert next to European Alps.
The name Terra Firma Incognita suggests that the known world remains, in some sense, unknowable. “We know the world as we know ourselves,” Wegner says, “in pieces that don’t quite add up.” Both abstract and concrete, analog and crudely digital, Terra Firma Incognita suggests a world gone dangerously awry.
Wegner’s work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions in New York, Tokyo, Berlin and Los Angeles. His paintings, artist’s books, drawings, sculptures and photographs can be found in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and The Yale University Art Gallery, among others. In February, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art unveiled a major new commission by Wegner. The creator of eight limited-edition artist’s book, Wegner is himself the subject of a recent monograph, P,E,T,E,R,W,E,G,N,E,R, published by W.L. Griffin Editions/Los Angeles.
