Telluride Arts HQ East
July 2 – 29, 2024
Telluride Arts Presents:
Earth Versions
By Heather Romney
Originally trained as a photographer, Heather Romney has been painting since 2017. For this series, she has been exploring the geography of the former Lake Bonneville, a Late Pleistocene paleolake. The Great Salt Lake is a remnant, and the old shorelines can still be seen in the foothills of the Wasatch Front. Heather travels the area using Google Earth, snipping photos of different landscape elements. She creates collages from those screenshots, and paints the new images in oil. Although some views may seem familiar, the exact perspectives cannot be found in real life.
Google Earth maps the earth by airplane and satellite, taking millions of overlapping photos of the landscape and knitting them together using photogrammetry. At this point in time, the algorithm draws and completes geometric shapes with precision, but organic objects like trees often render as blobs and awkwardly pasted textures. Heather is interested in capturing this moment in paint, before the technology improves and the 3d modeling of organic shapes becomes perfectly photorealistic.
Follow her on Instagram: @heddaronno