Though it has been almost fifteen years since Jose Arguelles' Harmonic Convergence was celebrated here with crystal-packin' enthusiasm, Santa Fe is still very much a city filled with people who base their lives on astrology, where 'Saturn Returns' is used to describe the foibles of twenty-somethings throughout the city, and where the semi-sci-fi realities of New Age spirituality and the dialogues of what used to be called the Human Potential Movement combine to create a rich local vernacular about the physical world and humanity's narrative within it. As the artist herself describes it, this is a city where "Mercury in retrograde" is common currency for explaining away interpersonal miscommunication, a place where a morning in the local cafe reveals casual conversations likely as not to reference social theorists as diverse as Ken Wilbur, John Lily, Terrence McKenna, and Starhawk, and where the year "2012" is synonymous with the "end of the old world," as prophecized by Arguelles and other interpreters of the Mayan calendar.

This slice of life of Santa Fe stands in marked contrast to the reality of Los Alamos, forty miles to the north, a city which began the last century as a sheep farm and boys school but by the end of World War II became synonymous with the balance of global power and man's hubris in actively engaging the basic building blocks of the universe to unleash the destructive power of the atom. If Santa Fe is the "City Different" of creativity and the "light" of the healing arts, then perhaps it has developed in this manner as an antidote to the city of dark powers and death that Los Alamos has come to symbolize around the world.

I first encountered Wanenmacher's work in 1994, in the Linda Durham Gallery in downtown Santa Fe. "Gaia" caught my eye through both its craftsmanship and its title. Sculpted from 44 carved wooden leaves interlocked to form the shape of a woman's body, "Gaia" made obvious reference to James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which deconstructs the standard scientific view of man and nature as separate entities, with nature as a force to be tamed by humanity for its own ends, and considers the planet as a living biological system with humanity as one small part within it. Dismissed as alarmist by some in the scientific community, the concept of Gaia quickly moved into the popular consciousness via the environmental and feminist communities to offer a new approach for moving towards solutions to the global ecological crisis.

Arriving in Santa Fe in 1976 at the age of 21, Wanenmacher has been weaned on all of these ideas and has drawn heavily from the historical richness and theoretical values in the city she calls home. At 46, Wanenmacher has established a strong reputation as one of this city's premiere artists, one who has created work here for most of her adult life and who has the ability to draw from the region's unique concerns and vernacular while still remaining very much a contemporary artist. Identifying as a witch, Wanenmacher draws from a panglobal palette of magical traditions in her rituals, but operates primarily from the principles of the Hermetic vein of western magic in the execution of her art-making process, which she equates with alchemical transmutation, whereby the energy of an idea imbues itself into the materials and the objects, transforming those who come in contact with it with the intention of the maker.

 

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