Hybrid Jungle: Crystal Wagner

“I am fascinated by the idea of the natural environment,” writes Crystal Wagner, “but find more and more that I am being alienated from it.” Through intensely skillful drawing, printmaking, and collage, Hybrid Jungle reflects this ambivalence, transforming Famous Accountants into an immersive space that suggests an enchanted forest or an impenetrable bramble. Shunning archetypal earth tones for sour, lurid colors and deep oily blacks, the floral–insectoid forms in Wagner’s work are beautiful yet repellant, marvelous yet insidious. Nature becomes completely unnatural in the Hybrid Jungle, like a twisted idea of the Garden of Eden manufactured by a Chinese plastics factory. Wagner continues, “I can’t help but to scrutinize the plastic plant, painted bright green, as a stand-in for something living, and the neon light or fluorescent streak for something beautiful.”

Crystal Wagner lives and works in Montgomery, Alabama. She earned an MFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 2008. Curated by Christopher Howard, Hybrid Jungle is her first appearance in New York.

Famous Accountants is a Bushwick gallery which has been written about in the New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, L Magazine, The Village Voice, New York Press and Time Out New York, BushwickBK, Hrag Vartanian, Bloggy, Brooklyn Based, and The Brooklyn Rail. Hybrid Jungle is the 7th exhibition at the space.

Please join us for an opening reception on Saturday June 26th from 7-10PM. The exhibit will be on view from June 26, 2010 – July 25, 2010. Famous Accountants is open on Sundays 1-6PM or by appointment.

Famous Accountants
1673 Gates Avenue
Bushwick, BK
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