Mark Wagner got the idea for his money collages, now showing at Western Exhibitions, after having lunch with a friend. “I got out my wallet, and he reached into his pocket and pulled out this tangled mass of bills. He had to spend some time smoothing it out. Something about that transgression of money stuck in my mind. I was uneasy at the messiness of it, but it had an appeal–like watching a horror movie. You’re not supposed to like it, but you watch it anyway. That visceral reaction is one of the strongest things about art.” There’s an antiauthoritarian streak at work too; Wagner once cut up his college diploma to use in a collage. At this show’s opening, he wore a paper flower cut from two one-dollar bills: “I made it that morning, after some phone consultations with my girlfriend.” All his money collages are made from one-dollar bills. For some, he cuts a single dollar into very thin strips and reshapes the bill, pasting it onto a board. In The Bubble, the dollar is bent into an elegant curved shape with a keyhole opening in the middle. In Chatter, it’s cut into thin diagonal strips, then pasted back together with the order of the strips reversed, making the whole bill look fuzzy. Other collages use more than one dollar to make designs. The almost surreal Akitu is a clutter of George Washington faces and face fragments; Topiary Dollar collages the leaf shapes on the bills’ borders into a “bush” shaped like a dollar sign.
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Mark Wagner
