NEWS

Current: Solo Exhibition at Ellen Miller Gallery

View the catalog for Ecologies of Perception

Read Cate McQuaid’s feature on my painting “Revenant” on her substack An Ocean in a Drop

An excerpt from Cate’s review:

The sublime is always a double-edged sword, part awe and part terror. Cristi Rinklin’s paintings tear apart the known world in ways that reflect the slippages we sense as the climate heats up and digital realities accelerate. Her new exhibition “Ecologies of Perception” opens at Ellen Miller Gallery on Friday, May 10.

Cristi’s epic depictions of nature echo Hudson River School paintings, but “sublime” in the 19th century reflected a ripe, eternal majesty full of possibility – some danger, but more potential. Cristi’s paintings evoke, as she notes below, the bottom dropping out. Digital tools she employs have so shaped the way we see that soon, rather than photographing gorgeous landscapes, we’ll craft AI interpretations of them. The tangible world slips away even when we’re standing in it.

But painting is slow. And paint is tactile, goopy, slick – whatever a good painter like Cristi wants it to be. Here, she walks us through the evolution of “Revenant.” The detail shots alone suggest alluring discrete works: the varieties of paint application, the layers. The sense of something just beyond our grasp – maybe because it’s moving too fast for our sluggish human nervous systems to grok, or because it’s too immense for a person to conceive. Maybe it’s because time is not linear and all the past and future of the little upstate New York copse she began with come together here, on an aluminum panel. I don’t know, other than that in Cristi’s worlds, nothing holds fast, except paint.

June 2022: Summer residency at the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation