Kaitlin Jostad

In my practice, I fuse pixel with paint. I translate the contemporary experience of traversing the virtual world into an IRL physical art object, mining the territory of digital space in both process and in content by translating the experiences technology produces. In negotiating the digital frontier through motifs of mapping, imaginary topographical plains, and the tension of an indecipherable matrix, my canvases marry today’s technological landscapes with the historicized marking of modernist abstraction. My real-virtual-real approach to creating begins by sketching loose forms in oil pastel on paper and transferring them onto the screen through a digital photograph. I use image processing tools to render, layer, and distort the composition until the work becomes illegibly hybrid. Each work is then rematerialized onto canvas by hand, becoming an obsolete artifact of a fragment of time in the digital network reduced to the scale of human perceptibility.