Robert Minervini: Praise to Light, American Landscape Revisited

This April to June 2013 I will be participating in a 3-month artist residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. A week prior to my residency I will be embarking on a week long journey by car from San Francisco through Southern California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado to Bemis in Omaha, Nebraska. During this journey, I will document and archive my experience of the cities, towns, and natural spaces I will visit along the way. I will use this archive as resource material for the artwork I will be creating during my residency. Having never been to the Great Southwest, I’m using this as an opportunity to experience new horizons which will influence my investigation of contemporary notions of nature, culture, and the American landscape, through visual images.

My work has largely been influenced by 19th century American and European landscape painters who embraced the land and its context as their subject matter. From this lineage, I create my work from an archive of photographs, both personal and found, mostly directly from my surroundings in San Francisco to create my multi-layered paintings and drawings. Documenting my experiences on the road to Omaha by making study drawings, paintings, and photographs that will later be used as resource material to create large scale artwork during my residency at Bemis will greatly influence the way I approach my subject matter as well as the trajectory of my work as a whole.

The culmination of this project result in a new body of artwork which will be exhibited at Marine Contemporary in Los Angeles, California in late Fall 2013.

Los Angeles to Joshua Tree, CA