NARRATOR:
Names of towns, blinking on and off like stars in the sky. Towns like Nameless…
PETER WEGNER:
…Nix or Nonesuch, or Lost Corner.
NARRATOR:
Artist Peter Wegner.
WEGNER:
I had been looking through atlases, and eventually found my way to these things called gazetteers. Essentially just lists, typically alphabetic, of cities, strange patterns start to suggest themselves to you. And when I came across the first instance of a town called Nameless. I was just dumbstruck.
And then when I came across the second one, I had a feeling of disbelief. And then there was actually a third. And at some point, I realized I had gravitated towards a set of names, all of which had to do with this quality of nothingness or namelessness.
And they constituted a kind of map, but like, a map of nowhere. So the utility of the map, the point of the map seems to have been misplaced somewhere.
NARRATOR:
So how do you make a map of…nothing?
WEGNER:
So the piece begins in nothingness. And then you’ll get just a little flicker of neon for a couple of seconds over here, and then maybe you’ll have another flicker of neon in a few different places.
And only at the end does all the neon come up at the same time. It had a kind of self-canceling quality to it. It seemed, on the one hand, to be, like, really emphatic and assertive. And there was this enormous expanse of wall that I was going to dedicate to it. And then on the other hand, it seemed to be occupied by almost nothing, by little pieces of twisted transparent glass. And every once in a while, it would illuminate, like a little firefly, and then it would go away.
Which seemed to me to be everything I needed to say as an artist.
So for me, it’s a perplexing piece. Often what I feel in the world is perplexity. It asks the viewer to experience with me, some of the— the oddness and— and incidental beauty of the world I find myself in.