Peter Wegner (American artist)

"[1]Wagner'ss official bio states that "[h]e often works between conventional categories, creating sculpting, paintings, painterly installations, and architectural photographs.

"[1] The artist first began deconstructing the subject in the late 1990s with his "Remarks on Color" series, which used commercial paint chip samples as their starting point.

Wagner's color-based "D65" series, begun in 2014, takes its title from "the standard scientific shorthand for the color of daylight", about 6500 kelvins and is "inspired by sunlight in California," according to Wegner.

Meltzer writes that Wegner's paint chip pieces beg the question: “How can so many shades of red claim the same name when, clearly, language’s system of difference can’t fracture fast enough or splinter small enough to cover the range?”[3] In a 2007 essay, Henriette Huldisch observed that Wegner “repeatedly invokes language specifically to create associations, to link his works back to the world of ideas and things from which they originated: systems of classification, names of places, and the incidental items of our daily lives (rulers, billboards, contracts, and so on).”[1] Huldisch goes on to describe how “Wegner also work[s] as a bibliophile collagist, appropriating snippets of marketing jargon, then cutting and pasting the functional epithets into semi-accidental verse he terms ‘poetry written by commerce.’"[1] A fourth theme identified by experts is Wegner's engagement with architecture.

For example, in his photography series "Buildings Made of Sky," Wegner reverses urban streetscapes to reveal how skyscrapers shape the open-air spaces between one another into skyscraper-like forms of their own.

Chasin described a 2004 piece from the series in these terms: “A magical reversal thereby takes place: the physical buildings read visually as a darkened background offset by architectural contours from startling blue-hued visions of skyscrapers carved from atmosphere.

Huldisch noted that “[h]is stacks, grids, and lattice structures reveal both an interest in the forms of Minimalism and a rejection of the stringent doctrine that predicated them.

He combined both in 2007 to create “THE UNITED STATES OF NOTHING,” which included time-controlled neon signage showing the name, latitude, and longitude of every U.S. city that invokes the concept of nothingness.

In a Los Angeles Times feature on the works, arts writer Jori Finkel noted, that it was "...an unusual project in many ways.

The former is a wall-sized (171" x 216" x 8") glass, steel, and LED display depicting hundreds of adverbs programmed to illuminate in pre-determined groupings on a continuous 90-minute loop.

[11] Their subject matter is the place names and GPS coordinates of various locations in Michigan, which Wegner divides into categories such as verbs, colors, and historical figures; the program lasts two full hours before repeating, and the LEDs are partially covered by glass and wood veneer.