Emberly Modine (b. 1975) was born in Utah and raised in Moab, on the edge of the Canyonlands. Growing up in a stripped desert landscape shaped her understanding of time, erosion, and visibility, where human impact remains legible.

She was raised in the cultural aftermath of the 1970s, when expanded ideas around feminism, spirituality, and self-exploration had entered everyday life. These influences were present not as doctrine, but as a prevailing openness to questioning authority, perception, and inherited belief systems.

Moab was shaped by Diné peoples, Mormon homesteaders, miners, and environmentalists, creating a community structured around land and resource access. Social hierarchies tied to ownership and use were largely invisible in childhood, becoming legible with age as informal freedoms gave way to inherited divisions. These early observations continue to inform Modine’s attention to power, occupation, and the quiet mechanics of endurance and exclusion.

This way of reading landscape extends naturally into Modine’s ocean-based work. Where the desert registers impact through exposure and erosion, the sea carries it through motion, accumulation, and force. Both environments reveal systems shaped over time by pressure rather than intention.

Working within—and against—the tradition of American landscape painting, Modine’s paintings exist between illustration and realism, her paintings show systems under pressure, without offering solutions or conclusions.

Modine studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and lives and works in Los Angeles.