Catherine WagnerHyperrealism

Detailed image of a sharks tooth
Catherine Wagner, Shark’s Tooth, 2000. Iris print on paper, 44 x 32 inches. San José Museum of Art. Acquired from the artist upon the completion of the San José Museum of Art Artist Residency Fellowship, awarded to the artist in 1997, 2002.03.02.

Though Catherine Wagner has no formal training in science, her methodologies are similar to the scientific approach of creating knowledge through observation and classification. She typically works with large-format view cameras, as the film size—8 x 10 inches—allows for extremely high resolution, beyond what the human eye can see.1 To move in closer and closer on her subjects, Wagner collaborates with scientific laboratories and uses the scanning electron microscope to create hyperreal images of objects under scientific research. The surface scan of a shark’s tooth in Shark’s Tooth (2000) shows a rich topography—a landscape that is at once real but eerily outside of our sensing capacities.

  1. “Work in Progress: Catherine Wagner’s Flux Density,” Spark, KQED, San Francisco, posted March 25, 2011, video, 9:26 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=wSCPRGyL26g. ↩︎