Visual Art
Summer Wagner, Evolution of the Eye, 2022. Digital photograph, 25 ⅗ x 39 ⅗ inches
Artist’s Statement
A woman stands with a row of trees, peering at an unknown observer. Behind her is a blue lake of clear water and a wall of earth dappled with a host of pines and naked deciduous trees preparing for winter. Her phone’s flash is bright, held between and above where we can assume the woman’s eyes lie behind the screen: a third eye.
Billions of years ago, cyanobacteria developed the ability to harness the power of the sun: photosensitive cells overtook the oceans, turning light into energy. Today we share genes with those same organisms, and the birds, fish, mushrooms, and trees. Our eyes perceive light through the same deep ancestral structures trees use to photosynthesize.
Half a million years of human consciousness later and we’ve evolved to build our third eye outside of ourselves. An eye that can see across the world and into the past all at once. We’ve written the collective unconscious into algorithms that ebb and flow on the shores of our individual subconscious.
And still, we walk amongst these ancestors, often with an unshakable feeling that a body of trees isn’t so different after all, but rather a forest of sentient eyes.
Summer Wagner is a fine art photographer and film director based in Los Angeles, originally from the American Midwest’s Rust Belt. A 2026 Hasselblad Masters finalist, she builds narrative, dreamlike worlds rooted in the seemingly mundane landscapes of the United States. Her folkloric work shapes a modern American myth, transforming everyday objects—a kitchen, a field, a bottle of cough syrup—into symbols of the contemporary psyche.
The Pulse of Grass and Screen, her second solo exhibition with The Locker Room gallery in Tribeca, New York, opened July 9, 2026. The show follows the 2024 debut of Midamerican Fever Dream, a transmedia narrative of stills, text, sound, and film tracing a single Rust Belt family. Wagner’s work has been exhibited at Art Basel Miami Beach and Paris Photo, auctioned at Christie’s New York, and is held in the permanent collection of the Arab Bank Switzerland and the Rockford Art Museum. Her first book is set to release in October 2026 with Setanta Books