About the Artist

Robbi Firestone is a contemporary visual artist whose work investigates beauty, urgency, and material truth in an increasingly fragile world. Working across painting, conceptual installation, and immersive digital environments, her practice explores how humans metabolize meaning, fear, and responsibility through the substances we touch, consume, and inhabit.

Firestone’s work unfolds along two philosophically linked bodies of work.

The first is rooted in landscape and sky: large-scale oil and acrylic paintings inspired by the vast horizons and shifting light of Santa Fe. These works are less about depicting place than about holding a state of being. The land becomes a mirror for inner weatherstillness, resilience, longing, reverence. In a culture shaped by speed and noise, these paintings offer pause, presence, and the radical act of sustained looking.

Running parallel is a conceptual practice that confronts the existential pressures of contemporary life…climate collapse, nuclear anxiety, ecological grief, and collective denial. In works such as Existential Snacks, Firestone employs mass-produced candy, processed foods, and familiar consumer materials to create visually seductive forms that carry unsettling truths. Sweetness becomes warning. Play becomes provocation. What draws us in also asks us to reckon with what we consume, ignore, and normalize.

Materiality is the connective tissue across Firestone’s practice. She moves fluidly between oil paint, acrylic, found objects, consumer goods, and immersive virtual reality, treating each as a legitimate substance with its own emotional and ethical weight. In her virtual reality work, Firestone uses digital space as a painterly medium, drawing live and in real time to explore presence, embodiment, and consciousness. Technology functions not as a separate genre, but as another material surface—one that is intangible, temporal, and deeply human.

Her work is informed by feminist art history, environmental ethics, humanities, and existential philosophy; fields that ask how we care for bodies, landscapes, and futures under pressure. Across all media, Firestone is interested in art’s capacity to serve as both refuge and reckoning: something beautiful enough to hold our attention and honest enough to hold our fear.

Ultimately, her practice invites viewers not toward despair, but toward awareness, responsibility, and a more intimate relationship with the world we are shaping together.