Jerry Wayne Downs
Artist Jerry Wayne Downs – a former animator for Disney – painted these interpretations of American landmarks for a series titled I Remember California. While these worlds certainly recall the disorienting effects of Escher’s mathematical prints as well as the dream-like atmospheres popularized by surrealists like Dali, one can safely assume that Downs’s career as an animator had a hand in his creative process.
Neither conclusively dystopian nor entirely utopian, Downs’s paintings still depict “topias” of other kinds. Themes of technology, ecology, and politics work their way into Downs’s imagined, futuristic worlds, prompting questions about the fragility of our present.
See more of Downs’s work at his website here.
