{"id":43283,"date":"2019-03-08T12:36:18","date_gmt":"2019-03-08T18:36:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=43283"},"modified":"2019-03-11T12:49:19","modified_gmt":"2019-03-11T18:49:19","slug":"jennifer-nehrbass-pioneer-project-reimagines-how-the-west-might-have-been-won","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/jennifer-nehrbass-pioneer-project-reimagines-how-the-west-might-have-been-won\/","title":{"rendered":"Jennifer Nehrbass’ Pioneer Project Reimagines How the West Might Have Been Won"},"content":{"rendered":"
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“Zadie,” oil on canvas, 48″ x 36″<\/p><\/div>\n

What if women were the pioneers of the West? Would our relationship with Native Americans be different? What about our impact on the environment? What would our society look like today had our region been founded under a matriarchy?<\/h4>\n

These are a few questions raised by Jennifer Nehrbass\u2019 exhibition, Pioneer Project<\/em>, at Julie Nester Gallery. The cohesive series represented in Park City consists of eight female portraits and six landscapes, which together tell a fictional narrative that brings up real questions. For Nehrbass, the project doesn\u2019t necessarily push a political agenda; it simply aims to tell a story while sparking an intriguing dialogue.<\/h4>\n

\u201cGenerally, when we walk into a museum of the West or exhibition of Western history, we see the same thing,\u201d says Nehrbass. \u201cThere are large portraits of generals or male explorers, heroic and overly romanticized landscapes painted by men, and then a few artifacts. Which made me think \u2026what if women were the pioneers? What would this look like?\u201d<\/h4>\n
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“Grace,” oil on canvas, 48″ x 30″<\/p><\/div>\n

Nehrbass\u2019 portraits blend elements of hyperrealism, graphic illustration and textile design. The face and hands of each woman are rendered realistically while the bold clothing and overall composition has a flattened perspective. The portraits are about 48\u201d x 30\u201d in size, giving each woman a lifelike scale as she fills the canvas and levels with the viewer. The women are a blend of modern-day styles and Western motifs: some wear fur while others don wide-rim sunglasses; one wears prairie-style braids while another lets her platinum-blonde hair flow free. There is a distinct fashion-ad feel to the compositions as the women are shown with painted nails and pouty lips, with their clothing boldly patterned in Art Deco designs or solid blocks of color. These geometric shapes and saturated colors pop against a stark black backdrop for a moody, chiaroscuro effect.<\/h4>\n

In addition to her portraits, Nehrbass paints a series of landscapes depicting idealized visions of the West. Working from photographs and a collagelike process, Nehrbass draws inspiration from a mountain in Austria or lake in Montana, merging the images into a contrived landscape. From a distance, the compositions flow seamlessly while closer observation reveals unexpected stoppage, blurred details or mismatched colors. There is something inexplicably \u201coff\u201d about the reality of the scene, which emits an idealized, Garden of Eden quality. Several pieces contain evenly lined rainbow stripes connecting mountain vistas or open valleys. \u201cI add in the stripes to remind the viewer that this is a completely contrived atmosphere, but still makes you want to be there,\u201d says Nehrbass.<\/h4>\n
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“Land of Plenty Good,” oil on cavnas, 24″ x 36″<\/p><\/div>\n

Through her depictions of an idealized West, Nehrbass references the Hudson River School, which went down in history as a male-dominated movement that started in the Northeast and eventually spread west with painters like Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. These artists depicted the landscape with drama and grandiosity as they were drawn to untouched and pristine visions of nature. Their paintings were heroic and dominating; Nehrbass\u2019 works, while also representing the idyllic, have a softer touch and brighter, more feminine feel. \u201cThis is the idealized West that these women envisioned,\u201d she says of the landscapes.<\/h4>\n

The assembled visuals in Nehrbass\u2019 landscapes, along with the bold patterning in her portraits, stem from the artist\u2019s first career. Nehrbass went to school for fine art and textile design, which included a semester abroad in Italy and then a year at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. After graduating, Nehrbass landed a job at Ralph Lauren where she worked for 10 years as a design director in the Home Collection. According to Nehrbass, her role as a designer was more like a visual storyteller as she developed collections based off sourced material that revolved around a devised theme or concept. \u201cIf I wanted to create a collection that had the feel of an old English manor, for example, I\u2019d resource photos of antiques, find an old pillow or beautiful piece of fabric and put them together in a design board. This created a mood or conversation around the idea.\u201d<\/h4>\n
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“Dayscape and Nightscape,” lithograph, 30″ x 39″<\/p><\/div>\n

While storyboarding doesn\u2019t exactly play into Nehrbass\u2019 current creative process, she still has a wall in her Albuquerque studio where she pins inspiring material. If there had been a physical design board for the Pioneer Project<\/em>, it most likely would have been a unique combination of Valentino fashion ads, Art Deco patterns, and passages from Willa Cather\u2019s book, O Pioneers!<\/em> which Nehrbass was reading at the time she started the series. In this 1913 novel, Cather wrote about frontier life on the Great Plains and the hardships of immigrant families. Nehrbass was drawn to the way Cather describes the vastness of the Western landscape that inspired a simultaneous sense of liberation and fear for the pioneers. These warring emotions show up in Nehrbass\u2019 figures, whose wayward gazes are often caught between peace and anxiety. While not explicitly defined, the women\u2019s ethnicities vary as their skin shifts from light, to olive, to dark tones, representing immigrants of various cultures.<\/h4>\n
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“Alison,” oil on canvas, 48″ x 30″<\/p><\/div>\n

At Julie Nester Gallery, Nehrbass\u2019 pioneer women hang evenly in a row, engaging with one another as much as they engage with the viewer. Together, they conquer unknown lands in ways that will shift the course of history and forever alter the future of their population. Viewing the portraits in this way sparks another question: How can women in powerful roles work together to change history? Perhaps Nehrbass\u2019 narrative isn\u2019t so far-fetched after all, since recent elections brought a record number of multicultural women into leadership roles for our country. Maybe now, we\u2019ll begin to see the long-term effects of women\u2019s perspectives and unified voices. \u201cMaybe this will be the moment that we make change,\u201d muses Nehrbass.<\/h4>\n

Pioneer Project<\/em>, paintings by Jennifer Nehrbass, Julie Nester Gallery<\/a>, Park City, through March 26.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What if women were the pioneers of the West? Would our relationship with Native Americans be different? What about our impact on the environment? What would our society look like today had our region been founded under a matriarchy? These are a few questions raised by Jennifer Nehrbass\u2019 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1563,"featured_media":43286,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[3380,459],"class_list":["post-43283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts","tag-jennifer-nehrbass","tag-julie-nester-gallery"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/Grace_48x30_600.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-09 20:36:18","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1563"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43283"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43283\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43291,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43283\/revisions\/43291"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}