Cole Sternberg

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

We are a species inseparable from nature and catastrophically incapable of living within it or living as an aligned, supportive community. My practice moves across mediums to test that tension, placing human ambition, ingenuity, and beauty alongside forces that regenerate, erase, and outlast us. Our art, language, laws, histories, and republics, however dynamic, are fragile constructs, forever confronting hubris and inevitable erasure. My paintings invite the environment to act as a collaborator. They are exposed to weather, landscape, and large bodies of water, allowing natural processes to generate new symbols and patterns while recomposing, erasing, and creating beyond human intention. Language enters the work through poetry, propaganda, and the rewriting of laws, questioning ideas of community, power, and our relationship to the natural world. Sculptural installations and film extend these inquiries through time, uncertainty, and mythology. I am drawn to our desperate pursuit of permanence and the quiet elegance of forces that refuse it. Yet there is hope within that impermanence: the possibility of learning from what we cannot control, of adapting rather than imposing, and of finding beauty in uncertainty. The work does not propose a reconciliation between humanity and the natural world so much as an attempt to inhabit their contradictions. The sun continues to rise and set on the horizons.

Artwork