Jennifer Peart

About Jennifer Peart

BIO

Jennifer Peart is an artist based in Sacramento, California. She grew up in the nearby Sierra Nevada foothills where she developed a deep relationship with landscape and place. Peart studied drawing and painting through Sacramento community colleges before transferring to Mills College, Oakland where she received her degree in Studio Art. Upon graduation, she went into Education and taught for over ten years in California public schools. On a summer hike in Yosemite, she decided to pivot away from the classroom and pursue her art full time. Instead of teaching students to envision a better future, Peart now freely creates visual fictions of futures on her canvases.

STATEMENT

Depictions of futures that never came, or could never be, both haunt and inspire us. Leftover fragments of retrofutures expose human failures as well as triumphs. I look specifically to mid-century American architecture and works of science (visionary) fiction to feed my own optimism for the future of life on Earth. Through painting, I explore the faded idealism found in improbable utopian visions and our failed attempts to control Nature. 

My new nowheres re-contextualize motifs found in typical renderings of ideal architectural models and Shangri-La landscapes to give that abandoned desire a new launchpad. My aim is to emphasize the correlation between architectural and psychological space by taking new liberties in my approach to the medium. Among these methods are my inversions of spatial norms and divergent use of color and texture; all of which express my faith in our innovation as a species that is slowly relearning to coexist with a living planet.