The Big Show
The Lawndale Art Center
juried exhibition
Waggett’s work This Is The Place (Silver) is exhibited in the 40th anniversary edition of The Big Show at Lawndale Art Center, on view from 7 June to 17 August 2024. Juried by Dr. Laura Augusta, this ambitious annual exhibition brings together artists whose practices engage with urgent aesthetic, social, and critical questions shaping contemporary art today.
Within this context, Waggett’s contribution extends her ongoing investigation into memory, labour, and material transformation. The use of silver as both surface and subject reflects on value systems and the ways in which material histories can carry narratives of place and identity. The work’s formal language, grounded in precision and tactility, speaks to the layered relationships between craft, environment, and cultural memory.
Lawndale’s longstanding history as a platform for artists such as Dorothy Hood, David Aylsworth, and Mark Flood situates Waggett’s practice within a broader lineage of experimentation and dialogue in the American South. Her inclusion in this landmark edition underscores the relevance of her work within contemporary conversations about materiality, meaning, and the evolving role of painting today.
This exhibition featured the silver piece from the This Is The Place collection.
These works on linen canvas possess layers of precious metal, paint and ink. As the light hits the surface of the works and the viewer moves around the work, everything changes. Multiple textures, surface treatments and new tones comes about as if animated so that no two viewing experiences are the same.
The positive proclamation in “This is the Place,” emboldened in heavy modern lettering in the centre of the artwork, brings the narrative into contemporary focus while acknowledging the storied Victorian past of the patterns and textures that serve as the foundation of these works. The richness of these textures offer an extensive tactile dimension to the canvases, voluminous and vast, that sits somewhere between painting and sculpture.
