JERRIN WAGSTAFF

American Landscapes explores how the landscape of the American West shapes ideas about American identity today. As a starting point for the series, Wagstaff looks 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, Wagstaff mixes 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. His 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.

Wagstaff states, “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 endeavor 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 strange.”

American Landscapes explores how the landscape of the American West shapes ideas about American identity today. As a starting point for the series, Wagstaff looks 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, Wagstaff mixes 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. His 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.

Wagstaff states, “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 endeavor 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 strange.”

Wagstaff’s paintings examine the nature of visual experience in the internet era and the anxiety of responding to a torrent of information. For Wagstaff painting is an activity of response, interpretation, and physical reconstruction calling into question how or if we can we interpret authenticity any longer. In this body of work, the artist draws upon images culled from news media, staged catalogues, stadium events, and stills from reality tv. He likens this experience to a high school policy debate tactic known as ‘spreading’, which is to speak at an extremely high rate of speed with the intent that the opponent will be penalised for failing to respond to all arguments raised.

Individual themes of the paintings drift between desire, loss, and identity. The painting “Mattek Sands”, depicting back to back US Open mixed doubles champion Bethanie Mattek Sands, raises questions such as ‘What does it mean to be winning in America?’, while “Aftermath 2”, utilizes the wake of destruction caused by wildfires as a metaphor for violent deconstruction and settling into new equilibriums. As a body, the works in Miscellaneous Debris highlight how our attempt to cherry pick from the deluge is both personal and universal, to each his own.