Shirley Wegner is mostly known for her large-scale photographs of landscapes that seem sustained between real and fiction and question the relationship between documentary photography and storytelling. Using no visual reference other than her own memory, Wegner reconstructs sets of landscapes of her native country of Israel, that are embedded in the collective consciousness as well as in her own. Each image carries its own investigation, meticulously crafted over weeks and months to explore the power relationship embedded within the landscape. Wegner works across mediums, integrating painting, drawing, sculpture, craft, textiles, paper and lighting. She explores mundane and everyday materials to create each scene. Once photographed, the many layers the set is made of are compressed into a new form of a memory-image: one that is often purposely ill-made, loose-around-the-edges oscillating between real and artifice. She interweaves materials into images that make up a form of a lexicon of memory. Her practice addresses contradictory questions of power-relationships inherent in a landscape once it has shifted from a "nowhere" to a "territory." Through image-making she explores the materiality of the medium of photography, alluding to darkroom practices like solarization or test prints, or to digital glitches, sensor errors or photoshop commands gone wrong crafted by hand. Once shot, these functions and processes- once unseen - become visible disruptions of the images, questioning our ability to see the landscape at all.

Shirley Wegner was born in Tel Aviv. She is a multidisciplinary artist focusing in photography and its multifaceted dialogue with installation and video. Wegner graduated with honors from Yale University MFA program (2002) and from Hamidrasha School of Art (1994). In her multidisciplinary works she investigates a myriad of representations of the Israeli Landscape and the ambivalent forms through which it is constructed in and constructs our collective consciousness. Wegner has held one-person exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide, among them in Goch Museum, Germany, Islip Museum Carriage House, New York, Slag Gallery, New York and Farideh Cadot Gallery, Paris. Wegner participated in many group shows both in Israel and internationally, among others at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Ashdod Museum of Contemporary Art, Haifa Museum, Alfred Erhardt Stiftung, Berlin, Grand Palais, Paris, Kallmann Museum, Germany, and others. Her work is included in the collections of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Goch Museum and in other public and many private collections. She is represented by Rosenfeld gallery, Tel Aviv, a recipient of the Ministry of Culture Award (2017), and Artis Professional Development Workshop Grant. Wegner participated in a number of residencies including the Islip Museum Carriage House artist in residence and Dieu Donne’ workspace residency, New York, among others, with most recently a local residency at Hamoshava Museum in Mazkeret Batya, Israel.

Wegner is a lecturer at Shenkar Multidisciplinary school of Art, and a guest lecturer at The Institute for Israeli Art at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yafo.

Galleries

Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv

Farideh Cadot, Paris

CV