Artist Statement
2011
Cristi Rinklin
Artist Statement
The ability to artificially create a heightened sense of reality has become so advanced that it permeates every aspect of our contemporary visual experience. From cinema, to gaming, to virtual reality, sophisticated imaging systems have created “seamless worlds” that viewers can psychically inhabit. Powerful viewing apparatuses such as deep-space telescopes, satellite photography, and electron microscopes, have given us visual access to worlds that extend far beyond our corporeal senses. When our ability to imagine visual knowledge beyond what we see with our own eyes becomes augmented by this technology, our imaginary vision for what is dramatic, awesome, and sublime becomes re-calibrated. My work is a response to this condition.
As a painter, I present a pictorial language that is altered by technology, in turn becoming a lens through which we translate our contemporary understanding of space. Imagery in my work is constructed and manipulated through opposing forces and visual impossibilities, via intense color, and optical effects. The seamlessness of layering I employ is a response not only to current widely available digital technologies, but also to the great tradition of illusion in painting. As a historical practice, painting has created a sense of “virtual reality” for centuries; from fresco cycles, to Baroque ceiling paintings, to American Luminism, to the great Panoramas of the 19th century. These predecessors directly inspire how the landscape is depicted in my work, however, here it is no longer a representation of the natural world we inhabit, rather it becomes a manifestation of desire and memory imposed upon by the artifice of technology. In these worlds, vaporous bodies hover against ambiguous celestial or terrestrial spaces, only to be interrupted by layers of interference in the form of crisply defined graphic details that “snap” the image back into focus. It is my desire to create paintings and installations that seduce the viewer into believing that the impossible spaces that are presented within them can potentially exist.
Artist Statement
The ability to artificially create a heightened sense of reality has become so advanced that it permeates every aspect of our contemporary visual experience. From cinema, to gaming, to virtual reality, sophisticated imaging systems have created “seamless worlds” that viewers can psychically inhabit. Powerful viewing apparatuses such as deep-space telescopes, satellite photography, and electron microscopes, have given us visual access to worlds that extend far beyond our corporeal senses. When our ability to imagine visual knowledge beyond what we see with our own eyes becomes augmented by this technology, our imaginary vision for what is dramatic, awesome, and sublime becomes re-calibrated. My work is a response to this condition.
As a painter, I present a pictorial language that is altered by technology, in turn becoming a lens through which we translate our contemporary understanding of space. Imagery in my work is constructed and manipulated through opposing forces and visual impossibilities, via intense color, and optical effects. The seamlessness of layering I employ is a response not only to current widely available digital technologies, but also to the great tradition of illusion in painting. As a historical practice, painting has created a sense of “virtual reality” for centuries; from fresco cycles, to Baroque ceiling paintings, to American Luminism, to the great Panoramas of the 19th century. These predecessors directly inspire how the landscape is depicted in my work, however, here it is no longer a representation of the natural world we inhabit, rather it becomes a manifestation of desire and memory imposed upon by the artifice of technology. In these worlds, vaporous bodies hover against ambiguous celestial or terrestrial spaces, only to be interrupted by layers of interference in the form of crisply defined graphic details that “snap” the image back into focus. It is my desire to create paintings and installations that seduce the viewer into believing that the impossible spaces that are presented within them can potentially exist.
