Tanya Wischerath

tanyawischerath.com | @tanyawischerath

Inspired by the eerie orange skies of September 9, 2020 in Northern California, Tanya Wischerath captures a moment of the everyday transformed into the uncanny.

Tanya Wischerath Artist Statement

This print is based off pictures I took in my neighborhood on September 9th, 2020. Stained by the dark, rusty light, the normally idyllic Victorian cottages were transformed into menacing structures; the metamorphosis of San Francisco into a seemingly Martian landscape echoing the transformation of our previous social and political landscape into an increasingly unfamiliar one. As I was carving this print, I kept imagining how September 9th, 2020 would read in the hindsight of the future's people. It could just as easily be a warning that inspired genuine environmental changes as it could be the first of many eventual identical days taking us past the point of environmental reconciliation. There was something poetic, and uncomfortable in the parallels of destroying a piece of wood for the aim of recording of an event caused by the destruction of the forests. In some terrible way it all felt connected, the woods burning, the wooden houses built from the material I was carving to depict them, the completion of the print dependent of the irreversible destruction of the panel. 

Checklist:

September 9th, 2020. Noon, wood cut reduction print, oil on paper, 19” x 30” paper size, 16” x 24” image size, 2020, $200