brian wagner

brian wagner

Brian received their B.F.A. in Printmaking and Drawing and Art History in 2019. In 2020 they attended the world-renowned Tamarind Institute of Fine Art Lithography in Albuquerque, NM and are a trained Collaborative Printer and Lithographer. They are currently working and living in Minneapolis, MN.

They primarily work in Lithography, a printmaking process utilizing ancient bavarian limestone as a planographic method of printing based on the immiscibility of oil and water. The image is hand drawn, affixed by means of a chemical reaction, and then printed from the stone.

Their work currently focuses on queer existence and memory and their interest in queer domesticity and what it’s like living in and occupying these spaces. Drawing upon these memories and their identity as a young, queer, rural child and how those formative experiences have been influential to their sexuality and identity as a non-binary individual. 

While formal, their  process is based off of a “sketchbook” or “journaling”; as a selection of thoughts, imagery, and personal experience and often incorporates text and snippets of writing as connection to lived, day-to-day life as a queer person. Immersing the spaces we inhabit as no different than any other. They are meant to be reclaimed and lived in and are spaces of transition and are often temporary, ever-changing, and ever-growing, something that they find cohesive with their own sexuality, queerness, and identity.

This work contains densely-layered and rendered lithographs that explore the tenderness, loneliness, acceptance, and gentle anger of queerness and healing. These prints and writings consider the physical and emotional spaces of love, hurt, trauma, and remembrance of relationships in the forms of drawn landscapes and queer symbolism of the day-to-day life of a queer person.