Mirabel Wigon

Mirabel Wigon is an artist residing in the San Joaquin Valley of California. She creates landscape paintings that grapple with environmental phenomena resulting from, and related to, the built landscape. Her work utilizes a variety of painting languages of abstraction, naturalism, digital codes, and diagrammatic schemes to layer representations of a place, resulting in a compounded view. The scenes depicted are contradictions, where form and gesture take on multiple aspects to explore notions of progress, instability, and system collapse. The paintings acknowledge infrastructure instability and ecological degradation as dire existential threats, emphasizing the flawed modernist narrative of progress and innovation.

She states, “The world we live in is contingent on, and influenced by, unpredictable systems that define an understanding of space, place, and depth. My paintings are a conglomeration of signs, where the accumulation of imagery and painted layers creates a perplexing and tenuous notion of the ‘whole’ built from many discrete fragments of perception. Technological systems mediate a vast amount of information, shaping one’s conception of space. These systems alter one’s experience of space through accumulation, imbalance, and overload, resulting in opulence teetering at the edge of collapse. The opulence visible in my practice explores experience, immersion, and separation within my immediate environment. These paintings are informed by environmental phenomena and become a metaphor for catharsis amid tumultuous instability.” 

Her works have been featured in numerous group exhibitions both regionally and nationally. Her recent work has been exhibited in Cementation/Dissolution at Axis Gallery in Sacramento, CA; New Voices at the Jacki Headley University Art Gallery in Chico, California; Shifting Ground at the Michael Stearns Gallery in San Pedro, CA; Made in California at Brea Gallery in Brea, CA; and Painted 2021: 5th Biennial Survey at Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her awards include the Linda A. Day Endowed Student Award, Werby Marylin Award, and Provost Purchase Award. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Traditional Art from California State University, East Bay and her Master of Fine Arts in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Long Beach. She is currently Assistant Professor of Art at California State University, Stanislaus where she teaches drawing and painting.

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