Katie Barrie

Region: Pacific Coast

Website: http://www.katiebarrie.com

City / State: Richmond, VA

Years spent camping and hiking in the wilderness across the United States has led me to consider landscapes in new ways— particularly in relation to land management, park infrastructure, and humans’ curation of public land to fit their needs. Yosemite is known for Half Dome as much as its summertime traffic jams; the Grand Canyon now hosts a glass-floor pavilion; and more than two dozen national monuments are currently under review to see if they may be better used for logging and mining. I am intrigued by which areas are slotted for development, what land is seen as a landmark, and what is given the gift of being labeled “wilderness.”

My practice is a meditation on the history of America’s wild lands and the structures, both organic and manmade, found within them. Rooted in abstraction, my work makes a gentle nod to minimalism by breaking landscapes down to their simplest forms.