Jered Sprecher is an artist who makes paintings, drawings, and installations that abstract the landscape to explore the precarious relationship between nature and technology. His work wrestles with the beauty and complexity of the environment and how we as humans interact with the world around us both directly and mediated through technology. He received his BA from Concordia University and his MFA from The University of Iowa. Sprecher has exhibited at The Drawing Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Des Moines Art Center, Hunter Museum, Asheville Art Museum, and Espai d'art Contemporani de Castelló. He has had solo exhibitions at Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York; Gallery 16, San Francisco; Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston; Kinkead Contemporary, Los Angeles; Whitespace, Atlanta; Ferrara Showman, New Orleans; and the Knoxville Museum of Art. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Bailey Opportunity Grant, and a Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship. Sprecher has been awarded residencies at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, the Chinati Foundation, The American Academy in Rome, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. He is a Professor at the School of Art at the University of Tennessee. He lives and works in Knoxville, Tennessee.

My work uses old and new technology to compresses time into the surface of painting. Flora, fauna, and natural phenomena, experienced through digital technology, are the images I wrestle with. As we acquire and consume images, birds, plants, flowers, stones, and fires dissolve into the light of the screen, the digital lens, and the glowing tablet. My paintings wade into the long tradition of trying to capture light in the oily pigment of paint, however the paintings also grasp for the evanescent light of the screens through which we often experience our world. The paintings’ color palette draws from the unlikely pairing of the romantic landscape and the glowing light of the digital screen.

We try to manage the wild-ness of nature and the expanding presence of technology. Both nature and the digital world are places where one confronts the wonder and the dread of limitless information. My paintings invoke the wonder we feel when we encounter a thing of natural beauty as well as the vast technological landscape. The work toggles between longing for intimate understanding, while also being frustrated by the immensity and elusive qualities of nature and the technological landscape.

Each painting explores what happens as technology and nature continue to overlap and interact. Our understanding of our environment and our technology fundamentally define how we exist daily in this world. Our relationship to both nature and technology are vital concerns of the past, present, and future.

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