All of these elements blend in the fiery cauldron of Wanenmacher's witchy creative stew, creating a bold narrative message that interweaves throughout all of her work, at once highlighting the fragility of the natural world and the awesome powers, both destructive and regenerative, contained within it. From these rich veins of human potential, magic, the natural world, and scientific destruction, Erika Wanenmacher offers forth "Grimoire," a three-chamber installation of spells that seek both to unbind the destructive scientific magic of the legacy of Los Alamos, and to illustrate a new paradigm for viewing the natural world and our place within it.

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The word grimoire was originally used in the 16th century to describe a witch's secret spellbook. It comes from the Old English gramarye, meaning "magic," which is believed to have been derived from the French grand-mère meaning grand-mother, a reference to the crone image of the witch. Today, the word grimoire is used liberally to describe any book of comprehensive knowledge, and has recently entered the technological lexicon as a book of "spells" to decipher the mysteries of the Unix operating system.

Entering the exhibition, we are greeted by Wanenmacher's own "Grimoire," a hand-made book measuring 16"x23" and featuring an embossed print of the artist's own hand and the scientific symbol of infinity. Within are gouache pictograms of the artist's imagery, concocting the execution of her spells. In Hermetic alchemy, the process of transmutation begins in the mind. Using images rather than text to describe her spells, Wanenmacher keeps her process a well-guarded secret by a classic trick of cryptography, hiding her process in plain sight, decipherable only by those who hold the key to her symbolical dialectic. But the results of her tranmutative process is on full display in the three distinct galleries that house the ritual objects involved in her artistic spell-making.

The Magical Tool Box chamber marks the passageway from the symbological mind-work of the Grimoire to the creation of actual tools for use in the ritual of casting her spells, through the art of metallurgical reclamation. As anthropologist Mircea Eliade has described in his classic text "The Forge and the Crucible," the rites and practices of metallurgy and smithing have long been equated with the alchemical process of transmuting matter into new forms, accelerating time, and changing the intention of the materials used towards the ends of the creator. Thus, when Wanenmacher takes scrap metal, trinitite, and storage units from the salvage yards of the Los Alamos National Laboratories to forge the knives, arrow points, and altars of her magical ritual, she is at once "recycling" in the environmental sense of the term, and transmuting the energies of the military-industrial war machine for her own ends.

Sets of objects are housed in boxes reclaimed from the Labs, complete with tags identifying them as having once been property of LANL, and are adorned with hand-colored pictures of the detonation at Trinity, cast roses, and woodcuts. Box contents include knives, arrow points fashioned from melted glass recovered from the debris of the year 2000 Cerro Gorde fire near LANL, and an epoxy resin-cast pistol complete with a set of flower-infused bullets.

Like Oppenheimer before her, Wanenmacher has used Los Alamos to fashion her own weapons. But Oppenheimer made his aims clear when he used the phrase "the shatterer of worlds" from the Baghavad Gita to describe himself following the first atomic detonation. Wanenmacher's is a radically different approach. In unbinding the science-magic of Los Alamos and its dualistic treatment of man vs. nature, Wanenmacher does not seek to cast a Luddite pall over all of science. Rather, Wanenmacher embraces newer scientific models that express holistic themes within their theory and practice, complementing these with the metaphoric touchstones of mystical traditions that work with nature – rather than viewing it as a force to be tamed.

 

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