Maisy Gardiner: capstone

Abstract

The artist's statement: Having grown up in the rural reaches of southwestern Colorado, an intimate understanding of the American wests monumental landscape has always been foundational to my identity. I grew up learning how to be wild and how to treat the landscape as an equal, raised by equally rugged and gentle devotees of the natural world. My childhood was one of adventure; navigating steep river canyons or climbing monumental peaks. My fascination with my place within such a venerated part of the country has always informed the way I create. Play with color, light, and the contemplation of my role in the world are fundamental tenets of my creative practice. Through creating dreamlike landscapes with distinctly vivid colors and whimsical distortion, the landscape is freed from its traditionally static and stoic role and allowed the vibrance and electricity of its true liveliness. There are places in which the earth seems to become a body, a living, breathing entity existing alongside its inhabitants. Through reimagining the dreamy landscapes of my childhood being explored by wandering hands, my work aims to explore the spaces in which this sentience overlaps. The land can become a body of its own when granted the opportunity, something explored by the hands’ interaction within each composition. The human touch can be one of tenderness or one of invasion, a boundary that is tested within each of my paintings. My work aims to create dreamlike portals in which the concrete physicality of the natural world converges with imagination and its vibrant essence. In considering the landscape of the American west through the lens of collaboration and absurdity rather than domination, agency is returned to both land and inhabitant.