art + artists

New technologies offer artists opportunities to create works with dimensions no one has seen before—an exciting possibility that sometimes results in work that is flashy in form yet lacking in resonant content. Recent work by Irish artist John Gerrard (b. 1974, Dublin) is a rare exception. He uses customized 3-D gaming software to re-imagine landscape art. A former student of the Art Institute of Chicago, Gerrard is inspired by the look, the history, and politics of the Dust Bowl region. He creates contemplative, vivid scenes of farms and oil fields that raise questions about the effect of human progress on the environment.