David Wetzl

Morphing Mind Tiers

University Art GalleryDepartment of Art

College of the ArtsCalifornia State University, Stanislaus

500 copies printed

David Wetzl, Morphing Mind Tiers

University Art GalleryDepartment of ArtCollege of the ArtsCalifornia State University, Stanislaus

October 17 - November 21, 2007

This exhibition and catalog have been funded by:University Art Gallery, College of the Arts, California State University StanislausAssociated Students Instructionally Related Activities, California State University, Stanislaus

Copyright © 2007 California State University, StanislausAll Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the publisher.

University Art GalleryCollege of the ArtsCalifornia State University, StanislausOne University CircleTurlock, CA 95382

University Arts Galley DirectorDean De Cocker

Catalog Design: Kristina Stamper, College of the Arts, California State University, StanislausCatalog Printing: Claremont Print and Copy, Claremont, CACatalog Photography: Courtesy of the Artists

ISBN: 0-9802410-2-2

Cover Image: Evolution of S.C.I.P.: From Youthful Feline Shaman to TAICOOco. C.E.O. (detail) 2007 45” x 57” acrylic on wood panel, latex painted backdrop

Contents

Director’s Foreword .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 4

The Simultaneity of Everything: David Wetzl’s ‘Big Maps’

Essay by David Roth .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 5

Morphing Mind Tiers: Images, Statement, and Resume .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 7

Acknowledgments .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. . 30

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Director’s Foreword

This catalog, David Wetzl, Morphing Mind Tiers, represents David Wetzl’s most recent work. David Wetzl has consistently been one of the painters to watch in Northern California. With an incredible eye for graphics and color, David creates work of rich textures and structures that cross over many of the boundaries that make contemporary painting such an interesting and invigorating part of art today.

Many colleagues have been instrumental in presenting this exhibition. I would like to thank David Wetzl for allowing the University Art Gallery to exhibit his remarkable work and for his devotion to the catalog and the exhibition. David Roth for his perceptive essay, Kristina Stamper of the College of the Arts, California State University, Stanislaus for the superb catalog design and Claremont Print and Copy for their expertise in printing this catalog.

Much appreciation is extended to the Instructionally Related Activities Program of California State University, Stanislaus and anonymous donors for the funding of the exhibition and catalog.

Dean De Cocker, DirectorUniversity Art GalleryCalifornia State University, Stanislaus

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The Simultaneity of Everything: David Wetzl’s ‘Big Maps’

By David M. Roth

A widely shared expectation for artists is that they reflect the historical moment they inhabit. But for painter David Wetzl that’s never been enough. Wetzl believes that every stage in the evolution of human consciousness exists in the present, and that each operates simultaneously as part of a fluid composite – one whose component parts are not simply neutral facts on a flat, postmodernist landscape but active forces that shape our experience.

To explore that notion, Wetzl began reading philosopher Ken Wilber (“A brief History of Everything”) about eight years ago and has since employed Wilber’s “integrative map” of human consciousness to guide his thinking. The result is “Morphing Mind Tiers,” a sprawling, seven-year survey consisting of 17 narrative paintings and two installations. The largest and most ambitious consist of acrylic-on-shaped-wood panels set against blob-shaped “backdrops” painted across large swaths of wall. There are also smaller stand-alone panels, a wall-sized, 3-D installation and a quartet of vinyl panels set against a backdrop measuring 11 feet high and 30 feet in length.

All are littered with sharply skewed references to culture, history, religion, politics, science and psychology. And while the pictures can be dizzyingly labyrinthine – many bring to mind the subterranean universe in the movie “Brazil” – they are also, on account of their pop/postmodernist sensibility, readily accessible and most notable for the sheer quantity of information they contain. Freeways, bridges, billboards, radio towers, tribal masks, landmark buildings, geometric lines, figures and decorative patterns appear as reoccurring motifs. Painted in a variety of styles (cubism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, pop, minimalism, geometric abstraction), they portray the contemporary mindset as a chaotic cocktail – of genetic memory, animal instinct, rationalism, religious belief, media images, subconscious urges and transcendent, spiritual impulses.

“Evolution of S.C.I.P.: From Youthful Feline Shaman to TAICOOco. C.E.O.” is a saturated smashup of cubist illusionism and surrealist fantasy that, in terms of style, sums up Wetzl’s oeuvre. Its interlocking cascade of geometric blocks plunges viewers into unfathomably deep pictorial space while challenging the imagination with the visage of a flower-sprouting animal skeleton with nine eyes alongside a cat dressed in geometric shapes and polka dots. The fittingly obscure title refers to Wetzl’s alter ego, SCIP, self-invented muse who leads a fictional “wisdom-based” corporation that, according to the artist’s tongue-in-cheek mythology, rescued him from “wallowing in an elevated pool of postmodern pleasantries and slowly succumbing to its nihilistic, narcissistic tendencies.”

Indeed, where some postmodernists delight in emptying their art of content, Wetzl piles it on, and he does so with all of the sly, ironic, hermetic references we expect in work of this sort, but without the numbing cynicism of, say, David Salle – an influence that Wetzl keeps on the same short leash as he does other obvious mentors like Lari Pittman, Sigmar Polke, Miró, Klee and Kandinsky.

Wetzl calls himself “a positive cynic” and his work largely supports that assertion. “After Tiepolo: The Triumph of Virtue and Nobility over Ignorance” is essentially an environmental treatise, signified by the words “Carbon” and “Silicon,” the universal recycling symbol, loads of flora and an agricultural landscape whose aerial perspective is achieved with an overlay of rectangular paint swatches, sanded to create a scrim that looks like cloud cover. It’s an optimistic view, aided and abetted by technology, represented here by a slender piece of circuitry that ties the pieces of the picture together.

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Wetzl’s most ambitious work to date, “S.C.I.P. Train Propels Shaman Birth/Maturation beyond White Cube Death,” puts evolution under the painterly equivalent of a microscope. Dominant images laid out on four (3 x 4 foot) vinyl panels include a purple-and-yellow Rorschach spatter representing the “brain scan of a Christian speaking in tongues”; a “postmodern soldier” firing at a white cube representing minimalists (“who want to reduce everything to purity”) and conceptualists (“who want to reduce everything to ideas”); and a shaman with a cubed-shaped head, open at the top to indicate a receptiveness to ideas that defy reason and logic. All of this appears inside the confines of an 11 x 30 foot backdrop in the shape of a train whose exterior edge outlines the map of an imaginary continent into which are cut a truncated crucifix, an airplane wing, the grid of a printed circuit board and a series of udders. The embedded message seems to be that spiritual evolution chugs along as an inevitable force, embracing the positivist ethos while transcending its limitations.

Ten years ago, illustrating theory – any theory – was thought to be a trap. But for Wetzl it’s been liberating. “I’m mapping my own mind and using Wilber’s theory as a guide,” he says, keenly aware of the taboo he’s smashed. “Illustration used to be a really bad word, but I have no problem with it. It’s now a part of the culture.

“What I’m trying to reveal I can only put in painterly form,” he continues. “I don’t even know if it has a form – these are symbolic illustrations. They are referencing things that do not stay in one place; they’re only temporary and experiential.”

A transformative experience in Wetzl’s artistic evolution came in the mid-1990s in Oakland. “I was living on the third floor of an industrial building, in this post-WWII industrial wasteland, surrounded outside by this materialistic high-tech culture with an odd overlay of New Age values and Eastern mysticism.” It was there that he realized that he needed to find a way to put multiple realities side-by-side in the same frame.

To do that, Wetzl often spends months on a single painting – developing the imagery, selecting color combinations, sanding and repainting, and then, finally, varnishing the wood surfaces to a high gloss. He does this not to create slick eye candy, as some have alleged, but to unite the disparate elements. “I don’t want my work to be all conceptual or all aesthetic or all emotional or contemplative. I kind of want it all,” he says in reference to the grand synthesis advocated by Wilber. Indeed, the titles of some of his latest paintings – “Synaptic Witness to the Fallen Mod,” “Modernist Confessional,” and “The Jaded Third Eye reveals Itself at Pomo Hills C.C.”– allude to the shape and scope of that ambition.

As Wetzl puts it: “The universal mind is like water flowing through holes; it wants to go everywhere it can.”

David M. Roth is a contributing editor to Artweek and a reviewer for Art Ltd. He is based in Sacramento.

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Images, Statement and Resume

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S.C.I.P. (Still Image and Content Provider)200042” x 48”

acrylic collage on woodCrocker Art Museum, Collectors’ Guild Purchase

S.C.I.P. (Still Image and Content Provider) Series

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S.C.I.P. Goes Off the Road 200224” x 36”acrylic on wood panelDiana L. Daniels

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West Oakland #9 - Choosing a Third Eye 200036” x 20”

acrylic and ceramic on wood panelDr. Sandra Barbour

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S.C.I.P. Train Propels Shaman Birth

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S.C.I.P. Train Propels Shaman Birth 2006-200729.5’ x 11’

4 vinyl prints (3’ x 4’) on laxtex painted backdrop

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S.C.I.P. Train Propels Shaman Birth/Maturation Beyond “White Cube Death” 2006-200729.5’ x 11’ Panel #1 (3’ x 4’) vinyl banner print

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S.C.I.P. Train Propels Shaman Birth/Maturation Beyond “White Cube Death” 2006-200729.5’ x 11’

Panel #2 (3’ x 4’) vinyl banner print

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S.C.I.P. Train Propels Shaman Birth/Maturation Beyond “White Cube Death” 2006-200729.5’ x 11’ Panel #3 (3’ x 4’) vinyl banner print

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S.C.I.P. Train Propels Shaman Birth/Maturation Beyond “White Cube Death” 2006-200729.5’ x 11’

Panel #4 (3’ x 4’) vinyl banner print

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Jaded Spectrum Navigator Grows a Global Cap 200511’ x 7’acrylic on wood panel, latex painted backdropScott Schaughnessy and Kelli Madison

New Works

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After Tiepolo: The Triumph of Virtue and Nobility over Ignorance 200542” x 72”

acrylic on wood panel, latex painted backdropCalifornia State University, Sacramento, Student Union Collection

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TAICOOco. Corporate Head 200560” x 36”acrylic on wood panel, latex painted backdropDr. Steven Dorfman

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The Jaded Third Eye Reveal Itself at Pomo Hills C.C. 200624” x 36”

acrylic on wood panelJudy and Jesse Bravo

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Synaptic WItness To the Fallen Mod 200724” x 36”acrylic on wood panel

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Evolution of S.C.I.P.: From Youthful Feline to TAICOOco. C.E.O. 200745” x 57”

acrylic on wood panel, latex painted backdrop

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Evolution of S.C.I.P.: From Youthful Feline to TAICOOco. C.E.O. (detail) 200745” x 57”acrylic on wood panel, latex painted backdrop

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Modernist Confessional 200711’ x 7’

acrylic on 4 panels, vinyl print, wooden objects, latex painted backdrop

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Modernist Confessional (detail) 200711’ x 7’ acrylic on 4 panels, vinyl print, wooden objects, latex painted backdrop

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Notes on Morphing Mind Tiers

The main underpinning for my work, during the course of the last ten years, rests in the adversarial yet subtly interwoven connection between the mind and the body. It is remarkable and inspiring how these two discordant entities conspire and collude to generate magnificently rich and diverse, full-bodied states of awareness, moods, and leveled planes of consciousness. This mind /body theme has been voiced, in my work, many times over with the presence of a strong divisional borderline, setting up a dialectic that could be expressed solely in the form of the interior metaphoric landscape.

Over the last five years, the mind/body premise has morphed into a larger, wider and taller, spectrum of awareness. Developmental psychologists have discovered, mapped, and pinpointed eight (8) levels of consciousness within our humanistic domain of awareness. These levels are experienced both personally and culturally, and are revealed in my work via three symbolic forms: instinctual, existential, and terra incognita archetypes; present moment modern/postmodern semiotics; contemplative, post-rational, intuitive or subtle Platonic stages of archetypal form.

Recently, I have adopted the eight color coded system (put forth by developmental psychologists) as my working color scheme, and incorporated it into my work as a conceptual component/armature. Conceptual art, pop-art, and purely formal or emotionally aesthetic artworks are vastly important art forms. Simply speaking, however, they fall into the singularly reductive category relating to yesterdays modernist mindset. As an artist, I am a Prius, a hybrid, or mainly an all-terrain archetypal hunter-and-gather trying to dance with, and fuse the dialectical conundrum put forth, for many centuries by beastly beauties and gorgeous geeks.

David WetzlSeptember 2007

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David Wetzl

BORN January 2, 1958

EDUCATION

M.F.A. Painting, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA, 1991

M.A. Painting, California State University, Sacramento, CA 1989

B.A. Fine Art, California State University, Sacramento, CA, 1986

EXHIBITION RECORD

Solo Exhibitions

2006 Birth of TAICOOco., JayJay Gallery, Sacramento, CA2003 Windows ’03, JayJay Gallery, Sacramento, CA2000 West Oakland, JayJay Gallery, Sacramento, CA1998 Puritan Skies, Weintraub Thomas Gallery, Sacramento, CA1993 Para-Meta Selfscapes, Solomon Dubnick Gallery, Sacramento, CA Heart-Headed Warrior, 750 Gallery, Sacramento, CA1992 One person show, 750 Gallery, Sacramento, CA1991 The Linear Warrior, Diego Rivera Gallery, San Francisco, CA1990 One person show, Cook Company Gallery, Sacramento, CA1988 Post-Primordial Abstraction, Cook Company Gallery, Sacramento, CA1987 One person show, Slant Gallery, Sacramento, CA1985 One person show, Candy Store Gallery, Folsom, CA

Selected Group Exhibitions

2005 Eat Sugar, Spend Money, Newsense Gallery, Cleveland, Ohio2004–05 NEO MOD: Recent Northern California Abstraction, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA., and Monterey Museum of Art, Monterey, CA2003 CORE, Memorial Union Art Gallery, University of California, Davis.2002 ARC Alumni: David Wetzl/Linda Paris, James Kaneko Gallery American River College, Sacramento CA1999 The Big End, Big Art, Sacramento, CA1997 Black on White, Big Art, Sacramento, CA The Chair Show, Weintraub Thomas Gallery, Sacramento, CA1996 New California, Amos Enos Gallery, New York, NY Pedagogical Practices 125, Terrain, San Francisco, CA

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California Work, ARC Gallery, Chicago, IL1995 Sanded and Poured, 750 Gallery, Sacramento, CA1994 Paintings from the Capital, The Claremont Graduate School Gallery, Claremont, CA1993 The Surface of the Sign, University Art Gallery, Taylor Hall, California State University, Chico, CA L.A. International Art Fair, Convention Center, Los Angeles, CA1992 Group show, Solomon Dubnick Gallery, Sacramento, CA Group show, 750 Gallery, Sacramento, CA1991 America Show, Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento, CA Group show, Butterfield and Butterfield, San Francisco, CA1989 The Flag Show, a group theme show, 750 Gallery Sacramento, CA The Three Zamigos, a three-person show, 750 Gallery, Sacramento, CA1988 CSUS 40th Anniversary Show, Djurovich Gallery, Sacramento, CA1985 Haggin Art Museum Annual, Haggin Museum of Art, Stockton, CA The Cow Show, a group theme show, Slant Gallery, Sacramento, CA1983 Crocker-Kingsley Annual, a juried exhibition, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA

AWARDS

Makepeace Tsao Award Davis Art Center, Davis CA, 2003

Collectors’ Guild Purchase Award Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA, 2001

Murphy - Cadogan Scholarship Award San Francisco Foundation, San Francisco, CA, 1990

Robinson - Witt Scholarship Award California State University, Sacramento, CA, 1988

Robinson - Witt Scholarship Award California State University, Sacramento, CA, 1984

Purchase Award and Best of Show California State University, Sacramento Permanent Collection, Sacramento, CA, 1984

SELECTED COLLECTIONS

Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA Progressive, Cleveland, OH Sprint, Kansas City, MO (eastern region) Bank of Sacramento Wood Rodgers, Inc., San Francisco, CA

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Acknowledgements

California State University, Stanislaus

Dr. Hamid Shirvani, President Dr. William Covino, Provost/Vice President of Academic Affairs

Mr. Daryl Joseph Moore frsa, Founding Dean, College of the Arts

Ms. Rebecca Phillips Abbott, Interim Vice President for University Advancement

Department of Art

Gordon Senior, Chair, Associate Professor

John Barnett, Professor Emeritus

Dean De Cocker, Associate Professor

Jessica Gomula, Assistant Professor

David Olivant, Professor

Dr. Roxanne Robbin, Professor

Richard Savini, Professor

Dr. Hope Werness, Professor Emeritus

Lauris Conrad, Administrative Support Assistant

Christian Hali, Instructional Support Technician II

Jon Kithcart, Equipment Technician II

University Art Gallery

Dean De Cocker, Director