On the Cover, Regulars and Shorts

On the Cover: “Ornithologist”

By Staff

Corinne Geertsen’s works are quirky visual narratives about psychological situations. She creates her work digitally and prints it herself in small editions on archival photo paper.

She works from her expanding library of over 32,000 images including her own photographs, old family photos and scans. She’s on a constant photographic scavenger hunt, looking for elements for her work. Often she paints something, photographs it and adds it in digitally.

Corinne was born in Salt Lake City and grew up on the plains of Montana, where she acquired an affinity for strong horizon lines and bold skies.

Perhaps because her father was a psychologist, her work has a strong psychological bent.

Full of contraptions, mechanisms, personalities and plight, her pictures lean toward surrealism, as they have odd juxtapositions, non sequiturs, and an element of surprise.

She received an M.F.A. in drawing and painting from Brigham Young University. Later she studied Photoshop to restore her large collection of old family photos and began seeing ancestors as characters in dramas. She says that working digitally dovetails nicely with the way her mind works.

She lives and works in Mesa, Arizona. Her work is in the permanent collections of the City of Tempe, the City of Phoenix, Arizona State University, the i.d.e.a. Museum in Mesa, Arizona, B.Y.U. Special Collections, Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum, Scottsdale Public Arts, Springville Museum of art and the Tempe History Museum.

See Corinne Geertsen’s work at Phillips Gallery, 444 E. 200 S., in Salt Lake City until July 10.

This article was originally published on June 30, 2015.