Libby Barbee "Astral America"

My name is Libby Barbee and I am a multimedia artist residing in Westminster, CO. I grew up in the rural community of La Junta in southeastern Colorado and my artwork deals with the western American landscape and the political and social implications of American frontier myth. I work in a lot of different media, including sculpture, installation, painting, printmaking, and collage.

Inspired by Baudrillard’s brief writings about Arizona’s Monument Valley in his essay America, this piece, Astral America, is an exploration of the growing conceptual distance between popularized images of the American west, the physical places from which they originate (including each location’s geological and cultural history), and the changing meaning that the images impart on cultural activity and constructions of American “ruggedness.”