Zane White

After the Gold Rush is a continuing body of work that examines the changing landscape and ecology of the Southwest resulting from increasing land development, oil extraction, and large scale mining operations. These paintings challenge common cultural relationships with the land by appropriating the visual aesthetics of traditional western landscape painting to construct imaginary narratives that reveal potential consequences of current actions within the broader society. The dreamlike quality of the images elicit a sense of suspended disbelief that challenges our perceptions of reality and brings attention to the fleeting nature of existence.

This body of work examines specific sites in the Southwestern United States. Most Images have a corresponding site. To learn more about the site and the work click the link below the piece. Follow me on Instagram to see works in progress!

Links to works in progress and preliminary site visits I have conducted are listed below:

Ambrosia Lake/ Mt Taylor area - Gold King Mine Spill in the Animas River - Chaco Canyon Area- Oil Birds

Gaia: Exoteric Visions is a body of paintings that expand the possibilities of conventional surrealism by placing objects together that appear to be assembled in an illogical or idiosyncratic way, but upon closer inspection illuminate relationships that may be interpreted as social, political, or cultural in nature. The work seeks to create a confluence of traditional, indigenous, and modern world perspectives on metaphysical philosophy. Guitar bodies, pottery, sections of picture frames and enigmatic portals with stars and galaxies are all juxtaposed in a landscape with multiple layers of perceived depth that both deconstruct the illusions sought in traditional painting, and create new illusory perceptions of space. The cultural familiarity of the objects and the bucolic environments they occupy are both reassuring and, sometimes, disquieting. The work aims at a synthesis of the ancient and the modern; of the western with the eastern; of the native and the imported. Depicting landscapes that exist beyond time and culture, yet contain both. Environments that transcend the measurable and the absolute.

Retrogradus is a body of work that is more directly political in nature. These works have been painted at differing moments of time throughout my career. They often focus on a specific person, cause , or place. They are usually the outcomes or byproducts of deviations in my painting practice, however some have been commissioned ideas. These deviations have often inspired ideas for other paintings. Sometimes painted as stand alone paintings and other times painted in two's. I like them.