Artist and designer Abigail Dougherty, aka Neon Saltwater, creates digital interiors and real-world installations, saturated with color and neon, that resonate with nostalgia for the 1980s and 1990s.
Abigail Dougherty transcends time and place through her digital and tangible designs. The 33-year-old emerging artist from Seattle has a lifelong fascination with color and interior spaces. "As a child, I was obsessed with crayons, then later with oil paint. And I've always loved rooms; I used to rearrange my furniture all by myself, and I loved the feeling of changing spaces. It's more than just a functional or aesthetic form of expression. The energy that exists within spaces feels spiritual to me and is my greatest inspiration." This former interior design student at Cornish College of the Arts quickly took off, creating her own universe using 3D modeling. Her work draws on film photography, movie sets, music videos, fashion, vintage typefaces, neon lights, the covers of cult horror novels, magazines, catalogs and other advertising from the 1970s-1980s-1990s. She transforms ordinary, familiar places into dreamlike environments, using color, light and atmosphere to structure dreamlike scenic spaces.
From virtual to real
Everything invites nostalgia. With emotion, tenderness, energy and imagination. While digital technology has become her outlet, Abigail Dougherty has been quick to transpose her universe into the real world via installations, pop-ups (Barneys in New York) and exhibitions. One of her recent creations, Mystery Cruise 1990 . Justkids invited the thirty-something at the end of 2022 to refresh a 1930s gas station in Las Vegas for Life is Beautiful. The multidisciplinary arts platform has been in charge of programming this festival since its inception in 2013, inviting a number of talents including Shepard Fairey, Lakwena, Okuda San Miguel, Felipe Pantone and Camille Walala. "At a time when artists are moving from the physical to the digital, we thought it would be interesting to export the cybernetic wonders of Neon Saltwater into a non-virtual art experience, not just on a screen, but in a tangible form of public art," explained curator and director Charlotte Dutoit at the time. The vintage architecture is thus transformed into a magnificent retro landscape in neon-drenched colors, which has not failed to appeal to both nostalgics and Generation Z, fond of this resurgence of the Y2K aesthetic and the 1980s and 1990s.
