christine gray

In my work I look at the cultural mythologies that misrepresent nature and our relationship to it. I remake landscapes according to these fictions through both objects and painting, thereby adding to and revealing the fallacy of these representations. The sculptural tableaux I make as models for my paintings are theatrical, temporary situations where the real and imagined collapse into a space outlined by contradictory boundaries. Extraordinary outcomes are made feasible by the distortion of the everyday.

My most recent body of work focuses on the American myth of the seeker, traveling alone through untouched landscapes in search of a revelatory experience of the divine. Through the arrangement of objects, the absent character in my paintings actively imagines the sublime in nature with limited access to its vistas. Natural objects are combined with man-made materials to achieve a device, costume, or shelter that encourages the spiritual journey that they seek. These hybrids are jury-rigged, engineered intuitively, with a spirit that is half alchemist - half nomadic pragmatist. Reality is suspended as these ordinary objects enter the space of the painting. Light reaches across them as a transformative beam. Ranging from aurorae in polar night skies to bleaching white intensities these lights are palpable manifestations of the extraordinary. The 'special effects' illusionism which describes them is a flimsy reality against the factuality of the model. Their power to lure is nearly predatory. An omnipresent stare is a recurrent image. This omen warns the seeker, but the journey for meaning eclipses any vulnerability. These eyes signal the paranoia of being watched but also embody a sense of loss. Dripped paint and tear-drop shapes cry, as a lament for the inevitability of mortality. The seeker continues to wander toward the infinite, at the edge of the mundane, fashioning make-shift objects which orchestrate the miraculous.