Foolish Creator:
The Sorcery of Erika Wanenmacher

by Gregory Pleshaw

if it's not love,
then it's the bomb that will bring us together.
- The Smiths

Just around midnight on the night before the opening of Erika Wanenmacher's solo show "Grimoire" at Site Santa Fe, the inky blackness above Atalaya Mountain on the city's east side took on a strange reddish band of light. All over Santa Fe, people poured out of their houses to view the phenomena, and phone-lines jammed as people called friends and family to wonder aloud about its origin. Was this a natural event, or evidence of an alien landing? Or could it be something more sinister, like an "airborne toxic event" resulting from some kind of strange happening at Los Alamos, forty miles to the north?

Fans of astronomy correctly recognized the event as a freak occurence of an Aurora Borealis, but throughout the city, friends and supporters of Wanenmacher were certain that it was a sign that the spell of "Grimoire" had already begun, and as hoped, was manifesting changes in the physical world. At her home on the city's west side, Wanenmacher watched the event through binoculars with a curious look on her face and refused to comment, saying only that she felt the phenomena bore good tidings for her opening. But the event was illustrative in revealing the complexity of local mythology when it comes to understanding the nature of "reality" in Santa Fe, a cosmopolitan city of 70,000 nestled somewhat remotely in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos, where Wanenmacher lives and produces her work.

Artistically speaking, Santa Fe is a city primarily known for its landscape paintings and rich traditions of Native American and hispanic arts, and the contemporary artists who live and work here maintain their reputations by focusing on conversations that could exist anywhere, but which they voice almost exclusively in New York and other "world art capitals," thus sparing them the embarrassment of possibly being labelled as "regional" artists. Marquee talents such as Bruce Nauman, Susan Rothenberg, Peter Sarkisian, and Woody & Steina Visulka all live and produce world-class contemporary work in Santa Fe, but rarely draw on the themes of the locality.

Wanenmacher, on the other hand, chooses to wield her contemporary viewpoint across the bow of Santa Fe's own internal conversation, a rich blend of local myths and realities that have earned this city an eclectic global reputation as a place for both the healing and the visual arts. After all, Santa Fe, New Mexico is a city where one in every third person is a "registered healer" and nearly all the rest describe themselves as artists of one form or another. The latter occupation breeds Santa Fe's reputation, both real and imagined, as a vibrant arts center, while the former gives the city's hipster populace an eclectic cosmogony as to what might be happening next as we wander our way through the early stages of the 21st century.

 

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