Jason Saager
Jason Saager makes sprawling landscape paintings and monoprints that drift between surrealism, illustration, and early American folk painting.
Their flattened rendering challenge of one-point-perspective space allows for multiple layers of landscape, texture, and narrative to play out at the same time. In one composition, rigid triangles of blue sky form mountains against a cloudy backdrop; in another, plains and hills collapse under the edge of a golden sunset against a grove of trees. Saager describes his work as “littered with scientific falsehoods, nonsense, and roads leading to nowhere,” where “absurd perspectives multiply, immutable natural laws become optional, and artificial habitats drift into alien territory.” This fantastical approach to landscape suggests worlds future, past, and only to be imagined, evoking the planetary landscapes of science fiction films and novels, where different laws of weather, physics, and relations apply. Saager’s upended landscapes dovetail importantly with a time when collective understandings of humans, nature, and their relationships are constantly upturned.
New York, NY
Born 1982, Mesa, AZ
2012 MFA, Hunter College, New York, NY
2006 BFA, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
www.jasonsaager.com