Catherine Wagner - Works Of Braille In 2-d

Catherine Wagner - works of braille in 2-D Given the chance, most people would run their fingers over Catherine Wagner's seductive new photographs of old books - braille books for the blind, with their worn hardbound covers and bumpy braille text. [...] these seemingly tactile 2-D pictures of classic tomes like "A Tale of Two Cities," the Bible and "Tropic of Cancer" float in clear acrylic boxes that protect the prints and stymie the temptation to touch. Because you can't touch the art, Wagner has created wall labels that identify each book's title and author in both braille and written text, one overlaying the other. Fewer and fewer braille books, which are dense and expensive, are published these days, says the artist, who became familiar with the debate in the sightless community about what it means to be literate at a time when audio books and text-to-speech digital technologies are replacing the reading of braille. The images, painstakingly photographed in the studio on a white background, "are so real, they're abstract," adds the artist, who likes the contrast between those blocks of color seen from a distance - fading magentas, bright reds, mossy greens - and the surfaces you read up close, with all their "tactility and information." 'Cell-like' imagesSeeing these ripe objects through those powerful imaging devices, "they looked so beautiful and cell-like I decided to make this sculpture," says Wagner, standing in front of a big photograph of "Pomegranate Wall," a luminous 8-by-40-foot curving box of glowing orbs that was shown in San Jose and has traveled to other museums. At the moment, Wagner has two large-scale commissions in the works: six huge granite murals for the planned Moscone Center Muni Station - laser-etched with the photographs that Wagner took on that once desolate site during the construction of the convention center in the late '70s - and "Sound Wave," a 36-foot blue LED-lit ellipse that will appear beneath a sky bridge at an ocean-side Santa Monica apartment complex. Using sound spectrograph software that processes the sound of waves transmitted from government buoys, the piece shifts patterns and color tones in response to the ocean and to the movement of people passing below.