Justin Barfield

Biography

My work articulates a long love and deep concern with the environment. This complicated relationship exists because of physical changes brought by both natural disaster and human influence. Although natural disaster is inevitable and devastating on the landscape, it pushes back on humanities control. This becomes a complicated relationship where we create, rebuild, destroy, rebuild, abandon, discard, forget, rewrite, and repeat. We have built our own prison, surrounded by discarded progress in need to control. I visually represent this unceasing progress and decay in the reconstructed layers of insignificant decaying material and scenes addressing environmental impacts. I often create through the lens of printmaking and am interested in how printmaking parallels the idea of removing and reconstructing to create, a meticulous process of visioning the future through disassembling the immediate. Regardless, my work positions humanity as a parasitic consumer leaching off of its own progress in a complicated growth somewhere between being rebuilt and demolished.

Born in Louisiana, I have seen these types of moments first hand. Hurricane Katrina destroyed the home I lived in, changing the physical landscape into unfamiliar territory. The massive B.P oil spill blackened the Gulf of Mexico and devastated many local's way of life. I have even seen bridges constructed to make destinations more accessible only to bypass and ultimately collapsing local communities into ghost towns. I am interested in how these scars are not just local and isolated, but global and continuous.