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 from composite nature imagery, 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, forming new paintings and collages that straddle the line between real and imagined. The resulting images draw parallels to current popular visual culture, often created and delivered through devices and screens. His landscapes present 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’m endeavoring to create a new version of the American landscape: one that embraces contradictions. It is flat and expansive, light and dark, saturated and dull, beautiful and threatening, familiar and strange.”