Children of the Mountain

My name is Libby Barbee and I am a multimedia artist residing in Westminster. I grew up in the rural community of La Junta in southeastern Colorado and my artwork deals with western American landscape and the political and social implications of American frontier myth. I work in a lot of different media, including sculpture, installation, painting, printmaking, and collage.

“Children of the Mountain” is a collage inspired by a painting of the same title that was created in 1867 by the Hudson River School painter Thomas Moran. This original painting can be seen in the Anschutz Collection at the American Museum of Western Art in Denver. Through collage, I am interested in deconstructing and reconstructing historical images of the western American landscape, and exploring the ways in which landscape painting is both a result of and participates in the creation of national mythology. While early American landscape paintings often depicted the American west as rugged, sublime and idealized; my reconstructions include disparate collage elements that allude to the constructedness of that particular image of the American West; and also to contemporary anxieties about technology, human impacts on the natural world, and ecological collapse.