Jerrin Wagstaff

Lives and works in Salt Lake City, UT, USA

Artist statement

My current work explores how the landscape of the American West shapes ideas about American identity today. As a starting point for the series, I look at idealized versions of the American West represented in landscape paintings from the 1800s, such as those painted by Albert Bierstadt. Formed by composite imagery from nature, these works of art were used to build the image of America through the lens of European traditions. Like these early landscape painters, I mix handmade and digital techniques to deconstruct and reshape sourced imagery to form new paintings and collages that straddle the line between real and imagined and draw parallels to current popular visual culture, created and delivered through devices and screens. My landscapes promote a version of American identity wrapped up in spectacle and desire, where, with the advancement of technology, we increasingly choose how to construct and interact with our surroundings, both virtual and natural, making us the center of our own universes. By employing vibrant, saturated color, abstraction, and unexpected shifts in space and perspective, I want to draw the viewer into the spectacle of the landscape and then turn them loose to reckon with their own experience and desires in a new wilderness. Through my work, I'm endeavoring to create a new version of the American landscape: one that embraces contradictions. It is at once flat and expansive, light and dark, saturated and dull, beautiful and threatening, familiar and...

Artwork