My artwork aims to dislodge scientific tools from their analytic functions and turn them into poetic devices. Whether scientific or poetic, the object of our gaze is continually in flux and forever linked to our desire to find elusive truths.
Jeffrey Whetstone is an artist whose photographs and films imagine America through lenses of anthropology and mythology. Trained as a biologist, he explores the relationship between humans and nature in his work, investigating the roles gender, geography, and heritage play in defining our position in the natural world.
His “Post-Pleistocene” series is a testament to the profound impact of humans on the natural world. It illuminates the depths of wild caves in Alabama and Tennessee, where layers of human markings reveal millennia of cultural evolution. His ongoing “New Wilderness” project, on the other hand, portrays a human-centric American wilderness, challenging us to question our cultural connection to the wild in contemporary times.
Jeffrey has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. His work has been exhibited internationally and reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, Frieze, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times. His work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Nasher Museum of Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, New York Public Library, and many others.
A Professor and Director of the Program in Visual Arts at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, Jeffrey describes his long arc from the sciences to the arts as an effort to complete a circle. Entering college as a mathematics major, he graduated with a Bachelor of Science in zoology and a certificate in film studies before receiving a Master of Fine Arts. He joined Princeton as a photography professor in 2015 and was previously on the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.