Gianna Putrino received her BFA from the State University of New York at Oswego (2014) and her Master’s in Fine Arts from the New York Academy of Art (2017). She has exhibited her work in group shows and solo exhibitions throughout the Southern Tier of New York as well as New York City. She is the recipient of the Fredrick R Xlander Emerging Artist Award and has received two consecutive grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. Currently residing in Brooklyn, NY, her work is a response to the nostalgia and desire for an imagined world, a space between memory and reality.

There is a difference between land which is “earth” and what is “landscape”, in that the latter is loaded with wishful thinking. In the words of Simon Schama, “Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock.” My work seeks to create a disrupted topophilia between memory, reality, expectation, and experience. Through shape and color, I imbue unmapped landscapes with a personal reverie, evoking recollections, and yearning, blurring time and place. My work prompts reflection on memory's malleability and its relationship with nostalgia and escapism. In creating my fantasy worlds, my focus shifts inward, using the landscape as a vehicle to explore the departure from childhood while simultaneously trying to recreate the naivety of the mental environment. I find fascination in our ability to idealize the past, questioning whether our mental landscapes, much like our memories, are loaded with wishful thinking.