ARTIST STATEMENT

My work references both Early Renaissance paintings and digital technology through highly-saturated and detailed hybrids of painting styles. The religious narratives combined with digital symbols and artifacts of digital processes suggest the spiritual undercurrents surrounding digital technology in its potential for enlightenment, transcendence, and evoking a sense of the infinite.  Echoing this perennial quest, I position my viewer as an explorer and navigator roaming through various types of spaces coexisting within one composition, addressing the potential for fluidity between the concrete and the ineffable. Cyberspace with its endless databanks has become “ ‘nature’ for postmodern man” (Lyotard). This digital scenery has become so integrated into my life that I feel it is important to examine critically, attempting to understand and consider the cognitive and perceptual results. Instead of using a digital medium to talk about this experience I incorporate the historicity of oil on canvas or panel to enforce the tension between new and old present in my compositional subject matter.

The work points to the persistence of our desire to be transported by visual means and explores ways the spiritual realm has been represented in the past and today. The resulting paintings evoke a divine encounter, reflecting on both the religious subject matter referenced in Renaissance sources and the mystical aura surrounding new technologies.

BIOGRAPHY

Sarah West is a painter whose work examines the ever-changing digital landscape and the spiritual narratives inherent in Early Renaissance work, fusing disparate imagery and color palettes to convey conceptual overlap.

West has exhibited her work nationally in many group shows and in recent solo shows in Washington,DC and Winston-Salem, NC. This past year West was featured in the South 2016 edition of New American Paintings.  West received a Bachelor’s degree in Studio Art from Wake Forest University.  She subsequently received a Post Baccalaureate certificate in Visual Art from Virginia Commonwealth University and was then awarded an Enrichment Scholarship by School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she studied painting for one year.  West earned her MFA at Clemson University in 2012 and has taught painting and drawing courses at Clemson University and Columbus State University. West maintains a regular studio practice at DC Arts Studios in Washington, DC.