2021 MFA Thesis Exhibition
No Vacancy

Kat Jostad, born in Denver, Colorado in 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 to decode moments of her digital experience and recontextualize them within physical space. 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 now working towards completing her MFA in Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design, The New School and expecting to graduate in August 2021.

In my practice, I fuse pixel with paint. I translate the contemporary experience of traversing the virtual world into an IRL physical art object, mining the territory of digital space in both process and in content by translating the experiences technology produces. In negotiating the digital frontier through motifs of mapping, imaginary topographical plains, and the tension of an indecipherable 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 on paper and transferring them onto the screen through a digital photograph. I use image processing tools to render, layer, and distort the composition until the work becomes illegibly hybrid. Each work is then rematerialized onto canvas by hand becoming an obsolete artifact of a fragment of time in the digital network reduced to the scale of human perceptibility.