Exhibited: H - Z: Jacob Lunderby

Jacob Lunderby

In my current body of work, hybrid landscape paintings use images of deserts as a point of departure to investigate the visual and conceptual interplay of smooth and striated spaces. The foundation for my paintings is images captured from 2 films by German director Werner Herzog: Fata Morgana (1969) and Lessons of Darkness (1992). The films are set in the Sahara and Middle East deserts, respectively, and present beautiful, hallucinatory, and at times horrific images of the desert narrated in the former by a creation myth, whereas the latter imagines an oncoming apocalypse. I relate the multivalent potential of Herzog’s similar landscapes to the concept of the desert landscape as described by Deleuze and Guattari in their essay “The Smooth and the Striated” in which the desert becomes a site of complex psycho-geography where the vastness of space interacts with processes of occupation and socialization, where decay and regeneration occur simultaneously.

My paintings combine appropriated film stills and digitally manipulated images with aspects of abstract painting and decoration to compose multi-layered virtual spaces in which fragments, divergent perspectives, and formal devices converge. Through proliferating layers, the superimposition technique tends toward a maximalist dazzle aesthetic, while the half-tone paintings operate on a delicate, mirage-like frequency.

I view my use of appropriated images not as a transgression against the image’s original meaning, but rather as a device and logical circumstance of our shared image economy, in which images are easily re-contextualized. I think of my work as an attempt to contemplate social forces and possible realities while engaging in the ongoing dialogue between painting, photography and film.

Jacob received his MFA from the University of Minnesota and his BFA from Minneapolis College of Art & Design. His recent exhibitions are: York College, York; ICA, Philadelphia; Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul and more.