STIGGYaRT

Austin was raised in Idaho and was educated in the Pacific Northwest. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from Western Washington University and earned his Master of Fine Arts from Washington State University.

He taught studio art courses at a number of colleges in Eastern Washington and the Inland Northwest before relocating to Pennsylvania where he now works as Assistant Professor of Painting at Gettysburg College. His achievements have been recognized with both state and national awards and he has exhibited his artwork internationally. A number of his artworks have been purchased by private collectors in the United States, Europe and Japan.

“I’ve always been interested in painting’s capacity to describe the impossibility of the modern world. My interest mostly focuses on our tragicomic societal relationship with nature. The narratives I develop usually focus on the preoccupations of modern people in contemporary entropic landscape environments. The recurring motifs are mostly related to human desire: leisure activities, tourism, advertising, fashion and materialism. Meanwhile, there are many hints of darker human tendencies: violence, domination and conflict. These play out amidst backdrops of looming industrial infrastructure, explosions, smoke plumes and environmental disaster. I think of my work as an entropic reality where the natural progression of a closed system is toward a more disordered state, never a more ordered one.

To visually depict these contemporary conditions, I've developed the aesthetics in my paintings to contrast aspects of traditional realism with the complexity of a modern fabricated world. My process often involves utilizing digital fabrication techniques as an important way to represent certain structures of the modern industrial world. For instance, "incoming signal", I've used a combination of plotter cut vinyl sticker and laser cut paper stencils to render the Green Bank Observatory Radio Telescope and for "frack-life", Troll A, an offshore oil drilling platform and the tallest structure in the world.”