MARK WAGNER – C.K. WILDE                 

ALTERNATING CURRENCY                  September 7 – October 7, 2006

PAVEL ZOUBOK GALLERY is pleased to announce the opening of ALTERNATING CURRENCY, an exhibition of individual and collaborative currency collages by MARK WAGNER and C.K. WILDE. Please join us for the opening reception on Thursday, September 7, 2006 or during the run of the exhibition, which closes October 7.

Location: 533 West 23rd Street (between 10th & 11th Avenues). Gallery Hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 10am-6pm.

Using countless fragments of actual currency, MARK WAGNER and C.K. WILDE create collages that speak to the cultural, social, political and symbolic roles that money plays in our society. Over the last several years, these two friends, colleagues and sometime collaborators have in tandem developed a distinct repertoire of styles and methods, with Wagner working exclusively with the monochrome of the U.S Dollar and Wilde employing the colorful palettes of world currencies. As co-founders of the Booklyn Artists Alliance (publishing and disseminating Artist Books both nationally and internationally), the artists have evolved their currency collages in a climate of true collegiality and artistic exchange.

For MARK WAGNER the single dollar bill has proven a truly ripe material; intaglio printed on sturdy linen stock, covered in decorative filigree and steeped in symbolism and concept. With blade and glue in hand, Wagner transforms this icon of American capitalism into representational images whose symbolic force asks us to question our understanding of money, its cultural significance and relationship to art. Reproducing the ornate visual effects of tapestries, paintings, engravings, mosaics and computer generated images, Wagner investigates a broad range of subjects, from the story of the founding fathers, to art historical icons, mythological tales and the language of architecture. Recalling depictions of Venus, Christ or Eve, his life-size rendering of a female nude made entirely from legal tender, Fortune’s Daughter, explores the relationship between personal and material values. Playing with ubiquitous notions of beauty, the fragmented currency used to create Money Lisa alludes to the subjective link between aesthetics and commercialism.

C.K. WILDE’s colorful and decidedly more narrative collages employ currencies from across the globe as both a formal investigation and visual critique of money’s capacity for divisiveness and destruction. Drawing upon sources as varied as Goya’s Disasters or War, Cervantes’ Don Quixote and the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima, Wilde “paints” a world in which money drives the forces of greed and power that separate us politically, socially and geographically. This perspective is most clearly expressed in The World Is Yours, in which the varied palettes of sliced foreign currencies are precisely positioned to create the boundaries of territory and property, which money itself represents. Wilde’s intricately wrought images of commerce, war and human suffering span the ages, making us keenly aware of our present state of global unrest.

MARK WAGNER and C.K. WILDE are co-founders of the non-profit Booklyn Artists Alliance. Their collages and book objects are in numerous private and public collections including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Walker Art Center. In addition to some thirty-five individual works, the ALTERNATING CURRENCY includes three major collaborative currency collages.

For additional information or images, please contact Maggie Seidel, Associate Director at (212) 675-7490 or [email protected]