Catalogue for the exhibition ‘American Mythology’ is now available for purchase. Contact the artist to order a copy.
ESSAY FROM THE ‘AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY’ CATALOGUE
Jerrin Wagstaff: Westward Expansion
Truly all is remarkable and a wellspring of amazement and wonder. — Albert Bierstadt
In a suite of ambitious, evocative new landscape paintings and the epic, expository collages that prefigure and accompany them, Jerrin Wagstaff both builds upon and evolves the perennial inquiry of his art—in essence asking anew, What does America really mean? A previous series explored the tumult of extremely online American social discourse, through a Debordian prism that critiqued the mass appeal of crass spectacle, even as its style enacted the glitchy, juxtapositional cues of the information economy’s visual language. But more recently, Wagstaff’s interest has turned toward the American landscape itself, diving into this nation’s successive, sinful layers of colonization, erasure, extraction, oppression, and war—but this time through the narrative lens of its aesthetic majesty, its rushing rivers, purple mountains, fruited plains, old growth forests, and rugged coastlines.
The original mythologizing of the American West was per an arrangement that essentially lent both cover story and justification to a range of slaughters of humans, animals, and ecologies. And not that much has changed. But alongside this dark and largely unconfronted past, there sits the undeniable beauty of the landscape—inspirational, coveted, already inhabited when it was “discovered.” Regarding its snowy peaks, picturesque oxbows, endless woodlands, and canopy of sky, it’s understandable how so much myth and legend, so many visions and divine signs, so many chances to lose or reinvent one’s self, so many crossroads between greed and grandeur have flourished in the West. Wagstaff is furthermore specifically interested in how art, and early American landscape painting especially, played a foundational role in the intentional construction of this lore—and thereby in how America defined itself from the start. Perhaps no figure in American art history was more engrossed in doing this work than the lauded, applauded, pilloried, and problematic painter Albert Bierstadt.
“I wanted to get more into the framework of what the ideas of spectacle and desire and the absurdity of American culture are built on,” says Wagstaff. “And so these old paintings by Bierstadt which were being used as propaganda to kind of get people to go and claim the ‘unoccupied' land seemed like a perfect metaphor for the psychology of ownership and divine entitlement that festers at the core of American culture.” And more “perfect” yet, Wagstaff’s discovery that Bierstadt had largely made it all up in the first place. Even the most dedicated art historians have been forced to admit that no one has any idea where even his most famous landscapes are located, because nothing is “real” in his art. The mountains are from one place, the trees from another, the rock formation is possibly entirely invented. Bierstadt’s landscapes are composites at best, fictitious at worst, and yet they engendered an entire origin story for a nation—a fractured fiction, a self-absorbed cosmology, and a photogenic portfolio of invented truths empowering interlopers to make claims might be America’s perfect origin story after all.
But where Bierstadt presented his composites as truth, Wagstaff seeks to reveal that our “truth” is a constructed one. And to further this point, using the visual language and physical material practice of collage is a useful metonymic way to work through these ideas. Want to capture the idea of collective self-image as a brazen pastiche? Build a collage of elements culled mostly from landscape photographs and art history books, add interventional shapes of solid pink and orange and lime sherbet, smooth geometries that remind viewers of the image’s artifice, and staying true to the collage genre in their rough and apparent collisions that highlight their heavily mediated, raw-edged juxtapositionality. He turns a lie into the truth by showing its scars.
The nearly alchemical transformation that happens when these studies “become” paintings is all about the color palette and its textures, overlaying more intensified and dissolute, more obvious, imaginaries on the armature of fractious ideas as worked out in the collages. The paintings are, as befits the landscape painting genre, more holistic, but retain much of the segmentation, layering, raw-edged energy, but at the same time he paints in a way that makes it all hang together, less of collision and more collusion among the vistas’ disparate elements. The paintings still announce themselves as landscapes, but they start to fall apart almost immediately, as the shards and lozenges, spills and wands, spatial advances and retreats flicker on the verge of fracturing again. This is not only a fantastic trick of technical prowess as a painter, but it’s a saliently embodied meditation on the value of engaging with the art historical continuum and the concept of holding multiple truths simultaneously.
As the current political climate and the challenges of navigating a divided nation highlight the role of art in exploring these complex themes, Wagstaff poses questions to viewers rather than attempting definitive answers. “For me it was the contradictions,” he says. “The place is beautiful, but its history is ugly,” and like we all are these days, the artist is trying to work within the lies to create something true.
—Shana Nys Dambrot, Los Angeles, 2024