In the installation "Tool Cabinet Altar and Fool Suit," she takes a rolltop toolbox salvaged from a LANL machinist's shop and covers it with her own tools: incense named for various goddesses, a paper model of a Stealth bomber, the Fool card from the Rider-Waite Tarot deck, a photograph of Patti Smith, and a bunch of flowers. The work indicates that what we build results from what we choose to highlight among the tools at our disposal, and that the same tools can be used for entirely different ends than their original intention. Just above the tool altar hang a pair of overalls Wanenmacher wore while constructing many of these pieces. The overalls hang in the shape of the Hanged Man trump card, suggesting the artist's identification with that archetypal motif of the Fool or his manifestation as the Hanged Man. Shying away from identification as either the Magician or the High Priestess, she suggests that any step away from the conventional wisdom is a step into the unknown, but one she is clearly willing to take.

In the Crossroads chamber, the artist offers x-ray vision into a number of art-objects that we will later see in the final spell. Featuring eight light-boxes constructed of safety glass and copper salvaged from LANL, the work permits the observer to look through the lens through which allopathic science views living objects – as cold, flat, black and white 2-D specimens, rather than as parts of a holistic totality. On the far wall opposite the chamber doorway, the artist again re-casts herself as The Fool, framing herself in the pose of the zero trump, collaged together from X-rays of her entire body.

In Spell 2001, Wanenmacher releases the power of the four elements, earth, air, water, and fire, through video projections against each of the four walls. Air is represented by the looped image of wind whistling through trees, earth by the close-up shot of an anthill, fire by flickering flames, and water by the waves of the sea. Each projection measures 15 X 15 and takes up much of each wall, giving the viewer the ability to view all four elemental films simultaneously, and creating the sensation of understanding the witch's experience of being enveloped and infused by these essential building blocks of nature's own powers for creation.

On the floor of the room lies a pentagram 20 feet in diameter. The pentagram – the five-sided star surrounded by a circular border that denotes a ritual circle for calling forth magical dieties in the western magical tradition – is rendered through the use of colored sand, a practice Wanenmacher borrows from both the local Navajo and the locally popular Tibetan Buddhist sand-painting rituals. In both traditions, sand paintings are used for healing; in the Navajo rite, sand paintings are generally conducted for the health of a particular individual, while the Tibetan is generally more community-oriented. In Wanenmacher's piece, the intention is to have an effect on both the "patient" – a 1972 Volvo – lying on top of the pentagram, and on the community at large. The Volvo – a former gasoline-powered vehicle converted by the artist into a propane-powered, supercharged hotrod, complete with an eco-green flame-job – signifies both the "vehicle"-like nature of her spell, and Wanenmacher's hope that alternative energy will power the lives of Earth's people in concert with the rest of the Gaian ecosphere.

The interior of the Volvo is filled with nature-inspired artworks which the artist also intends to heal with her pentagrammatic spell. And on top of the Volvo sits another pentagram, this one constructed on lengths of silver-colored fish net representing Indra's Net, complete with diamond-like reflective nodes wherever layers of the netting intersect. In the Vedic tradition, Indra is a deity associated with rain and thunder, and it is believed that Indra's Net is a vast ethereal netting encircling the planet. Each intersecting diamond in Indra's Net represents the multi-faceted reflective nature of each person on earth to every other person-node. Early framers of the Internet, including Tim Berners-Lee, the particle physicist who found global fame as the "inventor" of the World Wide Web, used the metaphor of Indra's Net to describe the power of the global communication in bringing together the world's people. Theorists such as The Global Brain author Peter Russell have also used Indra's Net to describe the evolution of mankind through the development of the aether-like sixth sense of the many-to-many communications media. As the drawn pentagram below the car represents the five senses which are known, the pentagram above beckons towards the evolution of this sixth sense for the sake of the global Volvo.

 

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