Frederick Holmes & Company

My work explores navigation: how we locate ourselves, interpret patterns, and find our way through change. Over the past decade, my practice has moved in cadence with scientific discoveries, drawing on environmental science, celestial navigation, satellite imagery, and space travel.

Using encaustic, an ancient painting medium made with pigmented beeswax, I give physical form to contemporary scientific imagery and ideas. This intersection between an ancient, analog process and technologies that reveal our world grounds the work. Layered wax and oil translate satellite perspectives, particle trajectories, and orbital paths into tactile surfaces, holding traces of movement and change.

Intersections brings together bodies of work that connect receding glaciers, celestial movement, currents, and the trajectories of colliding particles. These subjects become an evolving visual language of circles, intersecting lines, and shifting fields.

At the center of the exhibition are four recent Mapping Buoyancy paintings. They bring these investigations together through the image of the buoy, a form in my work that originated in images of particle collisions recorded in a bubble chamber and has evolved through my observations of river navigation. The buoy becomes both a point of orientation and a symbol of resilience, responding to movement while remaining anchored.

Across these works, mapping is an ongoing act of observation and discovery. The intersections between the microscopic, terrestrial, and celestial offer ways to consider our own position within a world in continual motion.

Elise Wagner

Science and technology have made it so that we can see the world and beyond from entirely new perspectives. As a visual artist, this is the greatest platform from which to observe, interpret and respond to our world. My work marks time from keen observations and the constant tracking of technological progress, climate change and the rapid advancement of scientific discovery.

The works in Marking Time reflect the speed in which progress is being made in our contemporary world while taking a pause to notice the evident impact that humans have on our ever changing environment. This paradox from the fusing of two age old and analog mediums; printmaking and encaustic in these works comes together to mark our present time while also harkening to nostalgia for the past.

Tipping Points showcases the artistic perspective on the science of our changing planet, and convergence of opposites both in nature and in humanity. This exhibition brings together works that span the pandemic and prior. Its title "Tipping Points" serves as a metaphor referring to the many changes taking place in technology, science, human identity and our changing relationships .

Each piece in this exhibition represent years in which significant tipping points were being reached through new discoveries in technology, drone and satellite  photography, climate change and contemporary science. Such advancements gave us the ability to see glaciers on Pluto which was the inspiration for both my Opposing Cartography and Pluto Atlas Series.  

Equally, Tipping Points refers to the cultural tipping points being reached in our midst. Tipping points in civil rights, freedoms, racial justice, identity, loss and conflict. 

On a personal note, this exhibition represents tipping points in my own life through the loss of my father, my beloved dog Cleo and several friends. The exhibition is dedicated to my father Charlie Wagner.