JERRIN WAGSTAFF

Jerrin Wagstaff is an artist based in both Salt Lake City, Utah and Los Angeles, California. Wagstaff received his Bachelor’s of Fine Arts from Brigham Young University and his Master’s of Fine Arts from California State University. His work explores how American identity has been shaped by the idealized American West. By employing vibrant, saturated color, abstraction, and unexpected shifts in space and perspective, Wagstaff draws the viewer into the spectacle of the landscape and then turns 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 strange.”