Libby Barbee - "Constructed Mountainscape #1," "Constructed Mountainscape #2," "Constructed Mountainscape #3"

Hello, my name is Libby Barbee. I'm a Denver-based artist originally from Southeastern Colorado. Most of my artwork is specifically focused on historical relationship between Americans and the Western-American landscape. I grew up in the West, so it's the landscape that I'm familiar with, but it's also this mythic space that has had an enormous influence throughout history on how Americans have constructed cultural and political identities, how we've developed foreign and domestic policy, and how we have in the past and really continue to understand and modify the physical world. I create both two and three-dimensional artworks that explore these ideas.

For the One Sheet exhibition, I created three panoramic mountain landscape collages using vintage aerial photographs that were gifted to me by one of the curators, Collin Parson, many years ago when we were both residents at RedLine.

I'm really interested in the idea that humans construct landscape through our decisions about how we develop or protect the land, and that these choices are guided by our ideologies around what is and is not nature or landscape and what is or is not beautiful. In this way, I'm attempting to use the collage process as a method of making this process of human landscape creation visible. I'm also really interested in these particular artworks in the transferral of the image from one perspective to another; so the way that we can go from an aerial photograph to a panoramic image of a landscape and that it can still make sense and feel natural.