2021 MFA Thesis Exhibition
No Vacancy

Kat Jostad (b. Denver, Colorado, 1989) is a New York-based artist whose practice probes notions of identity in the multiplicity of the digital realm. Jostad’s work utilizes painting, neon and installation to decode moments of her digital experience and recontextualizes them within physical space. Many of her works use planar shapes, a network of perspective lines, pixels, and other digital motifs to express the exponential expansion of information in the digital age. The act of deciphering data and translating pixel to paint results in multi-layered art objects.

After working as an economist on a trade floor, she decided to change course and take a studio in Brooklyn, NY in early 2018. She is recently received her MFA in Fine Arts and Painting at The New School in New York City.

Email: katjostad@gmail.com                     Instagram: @katjostad

In my practice, I fuse pixel with paint. I translate the contemporary experience of traversing the virtual world into IRL physical art objects. Each work mines the territory of digital space in both process — by collaborating with programmed algorithms— and in content by translating the experiences technology produces. In depicting the tension of an indecipherable online-offline hybrid matrix, my canvases marry today’s technological landscapes with the historicized mark marking of modernist abstraction.

My real-virtual-real approach to creating begins by sketching loose forms in oil pastel that are inspired by filtering through three tranches of digital existence – CYBERSPACE, CYBERTYPES, and CYBERERROR. The sketch is transferred onto the screen through digital photography or deciphered and fragmented by code into digital form, as in the case of the Reboot series. Image processing tools then render, layer, and distort the composition and it is re-materialized in an inkjet print or by hand onto canvas. An algorithm then assigns the coloring and medium usage on canvas. The layered final product decodes a moment of digital experience and recontextualizes it within a physical one. Each work is an obsolete artifact of a fragment of time in the digital network reduced to the scale of human perceptibility.