The Technology of Ritual: Summer Wagner's Emotional Acupuncture

By @JustinWetch

Ask Summer Wagner why her images feel like they're showing you something you weren't supposed to see, and she'll start somewhere you don't expect. She'll start with squats.

"Rituals are a technology that have been implemented in human culture for probably as long as humans have been around," she says, "in order to place the body through an experience where it can integrate the ritual and learn from it. It's kind of like how doing squats every day is gonna make your legs stronger. Putting your body through a ritual is going to do something psychologically to you. It's gonna rewrite your neural pathways, if you incorporate the ritual."

Then she turns the argument on the internet.

"Putting that catharsis online makes it so cringe. It is literally the most humiliating thing to put somebody's spiritual, psychological, cathartic healing process on the internet for people to see. It’s like exposing the film before you put it in the development process."

Her work is an attempt to hold the opposite position. She builds scenes of ritual, baptism, communion, quiet grief, and stages them with the understanding that they shouldn't be witnessed, which is exactly why her images feel like you're catching something in progress, the voyeur leaning over the wrong hedge. A woman in a pond at blue hour, blindfolded, two swords crossed at her hips, candles floating around her in the dark water. The scene doesn't want you there. Summer made it anyway, because photographing the moment without the humiliation of the witness, she believes, is one of the few things art can still do that a phone camera can't.

Summer grew up in Rockford, Illinois, a post-industrial town ninety minutes outside Chicago where the church was a big part of your life and you spent summers in the creek. She was homeschooled, a serial journaler before she could write, the kid who staged little plays for her family. When her dad lost his job in the 2008 crisis and found work in Southern California, the family followed, and she landed in a large performing arts high school where she jumped into every practice with a stage in it. Dance, choir, theater, speech and debate. Visual art didn't enter the picture for another decade.

Her mother worked in fundraising at Biola, the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, which meant free tuition, which meant she took it despite being, by that point, spiritually elsewhere. Biola is a place where every class runs through the lens of Christianity and every student graduates with a Bible minor. "Christianese," as she calls it, is a real spoken language there, a social dialect you pick up from being submerged. She wanted theater; Biola's theater program was almost nonexistent. Its film program was excellent. She majored in film, intended to direct, fell in love with Tarkovsky and Gaspar Noé on her own time, and got through three years and a final semester before COVID dissolved her thesis and sent her back to Illinois without a degree.

She worked at a grocery store, Meijer, for twelve dollars an hour. A friend lent her a camera. She started charging fifty dollars a session for family portraits because she wanted out of the grocery job. In between the portraits she made other things. Stranger things. Scenes.

"The sheath of the seed had popped open," she says about the return to Rockford, "and all of a sudden I was in the right soil, and I was able to just explode and grow."

The first two collections came out of that soil. The In Between and Parody of a Tangled Thread, both of them retroactive, both of them trying to make sense of the decade she'd just walked out of. The images look back into the body she'd been given and ask it what it had been doing. They're processing documents as much as art objects, the visual version of the kind of journal you can only write once you've left.

It was right after The In Between that a drunk driver ran a car into her apartment in a rough part of Rockford and completely condemned the building. Neither Summer nor her partner was home that night, which was its own small miracle. Earlier the same day, she'd been deep-cleaning the place because her mom was supposed to sleep over, and she found something strange under the bed. Nine months earlier, she and her partner had done a protection spell when they moved in, sealed it with a small piece of wood, and set the wood on the windowsill, where it had stayed untouched ever since. Now it was under the bed, open. She put it back on the windowsill. That night the car came through the wall.

"I love believing things and also not believing them at the same time," she says. "It's one of my favorite places to be mentally."

This is not the voice of a skeptic, and it's not the voice of a believer. It's the voice of someone who has figured out that the interesting work happens in the space where both postures are held at once without collapsing one into the other.

When I ask what her spirituality actually looks like now, she resists the framing of middle ground. Leaving religion, she says, isn't a matter of landing somewhere moderate. It's a matter of moving farther than atheism, past the rejection and out the other side.

"You come to this realization that the world is this beautiful oscillating kaleidoscope of sheer unlikely life unraveling all at once, and that is inherently a spiritual experience to witness. Just the sheer amount of information and happening unfolding at every given moment. Anything could happen, and you just can't possibly know."

I ask for a concrete moment. She gives me one from the week before.

"I went to my sister's boyfriend's concert of his band. I'd never seen his band before. I show up, and it's a big room with a little stage, and maybe fifty or sixty people are there. My sister's boyfriend is up there playing, and his band is great, and they're just absolutely giving it all, and they're all enjoying themselves. And I look to my left, and I see this young woman who'd maybe had a few drinks, and she was so stoked on the music. And she had this really long hair that went all the way down past her butt, and she was shaking her head, moving her hair, and her hair was just dancing. And she was just having the time of her life, and she was screaming for the band. And then I caught the drummer, as she screamed, he would smile, as if maybe he knows that scream is for him."

She pauses.

"In this moment of observing these human people, I just had such an overwhelming feeling, like a spiritual feeling really, of sheer unadulterated gratitude. Gratitude for those boys going up there on stage and sharing themselves so vulnerably. Gratitude for this young woman giving herself to the experience. This is really, kind of cheesily, this is really what it's all about, is just showing up for people and being able to tap into that trance that we can experience together through sharing our gifts."

That's what her images are chasing. Her Chemical Baptism series stages a woman levitating in chemicals, holding a cross, surrounded by people watching her with their eyes and with their phones. She isn't interested in being for or against religion. The power, she says, exists regardless of what's wielding it. What she wants is to capture the power without the overexposure, the moment before the phone flattens it.

The images themselves are cinematic tableaus, her phrase, painterly in a way that has less to do with brushwork and more to do with how much information she lets into a single frame. She shoots deep-focus, subject and background fused into one continuous field, grass as alive as the face. Her color grading is the most intuitive part of her process and the part she has the least interest in minimizing.

"I would love to say I'm such a minimalist. I love making things look real and understated, and that's just never been true for me. Recently, many people have independently of each other called it juicy. I like that."

She traces the impulse back to psychedelic experience.

"When you're tripping on a mushroom, the world does become juicy. And all of the contrast between all of the different textures in the skin are really bouncing and vibrating. I remember wanting to recreate that feeling when I was color grading back four years ago, and I carry that with me still to this day."

The light is the other signature. Most photographers chase golden hour. She avoids it. "It's too orange," she laughs. She prefers the bright, merciless eye of full afternoon sunlight, because that's where you get the most detail out of a face. The softness in the final image comes from editing, not from waiting for the right hour.

Inside the frame, her lighting symbols run in pairs. Elders get lit by cigarettes and candles. Younger figures get lit by the blue wash of phone screens. Candlelight is one technology of trance; phone-light is another. You can see the argument compress into a single image in her Mid-American Fever Dream work, a cemetery-lit gathering in a grove of trees, a man cupping a flame to light a cigarette while another man a few paces away scrolls, the whole frame suspended between those two kinds of attention.

The name she gave the method, years ago, is emotional acupuncture. She builds a scene so that each element hits a specific nerve point in the viewer's body. Move your eye half an inch and the meaning moves with it.

"It's about crafting a scene so you hit all of the specific nerve points in the emotional body of a viewer to be able to elicit a specific response from them. Okay, I'll add this little tinge, and then I'll add this little tinge, and then I'll add this little tinge. And if you look here instead of here, it'll communicate this to the viewer. And then you get this beautiful cocktail of emotions at the end of it that leaves the viewer with a feeling of mystery or intrigue or both at the same time, which is ideal."

The conscious noticing is only the surface.

"The subconscious work is actually the big ocean of work to be done with an audience, and everything else consciously emerges because of all of that subconscious work that had been done under the surface."

Then, unprompted, she turns the idea on itself. The acupuncturist needs a functioning nervous system to work on, and she's worried ours is being used up.

"With our phones and media, I feel like we are all so overexposed to acupuncture all the time, this emotional acupuncture, that our nerves are being depleted. Our endorphins are so low that it requires so much more intense and less subtle of experiences. But then two, and maybe more importantly, our literacy is being drained from us. We have less literacy in multi-grain or nuanced emotional experiences. And I say this as a criticism of our culture, but also as a really intentional look into my own life and my own creative practice. I worry about it. My own emotional literacy is really struggling right now as I'm being inundated with constant images and constant emotional overstimulation."

She's currently writing feature films, fully aware that filmmaking is in an existential moment because the people it was built for no longer watch anything slow. She knows what a viral video edit requires now, fourteen of your best images stacked into the first two seconds, and she hears in that the brainwashing scenes from A Clockwork Orange. She is not above this. "I'm on my slop train just as much as anybody else is at the moment," she says. She holds out the possibility that it's a phase, that one or two generations from now the culture will adjust. She doesn't sound sure. She sounds like someone still making the work anyway, still placing the candles in the water one by one, still trusting that someone will catch the acupuncture even if they can't name where it hit them.

Summer's first book releases in late September. Parody of a Tangled Thread will form the spine of it, with The In Between folded in to honor the earlier collection. She also has a solo show of new printed works at Locker Room Gallery on the Lower East Side of New York in July.

Summer shouts out @funghibull, one of her first collectors and a steady presence ever since. @WAPSHOP_ETH, who trusted her with the commission for her first video piece. 

Artists inspiring her lately: @sougwen, whose installation with Fellowship at Art Basel Hong Kong she's been thinking about since. Filmmakers Kristoffer Borgli and Ari Aster, who she calls the two holding down the vibes in contemporary film. Painter Aaron Wiesenfeld, whose influence on her visual world she's openly glad to name. And, via a recent return to Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury, an Illinois writer whose style she didn't fully register as a teenager and is now catching up to.

What she wishes people understood is that the work is interconnected. Following her on chain and reading the captions is a different experience than scrolling Twitter. The book, she suspects, will help.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, @summergwagner recommends @AlizeJireh, @Defacedstudio, and @allseeingseneca. Summer was recommended by @samanthacavet.