ABOUT

STATEMENT

We live in a time of great uncertainty, witnessing drastic changes to everything we thought was fixed and permanent. The impulse to capture and save our experiences for future access is a distinct behavior that reflects this cultural moment. Ways in which we store and retrieve images, through memories, dreams, photographs, paintings, or data files are all simulations that offer fugitive modes of recall, subject to breaking down or fading around the edges. A throughline that persists in my work is the idea of impermanence. What is left behind when we no longer exist? Can an afterimage of a memory linger outside of human consciousness, like a signal waiting to be received? I think about these questions as I witness the natural world changing radically, in real time. 

Simulations of the landscape are a prevalent part of our visual culture. Painting is a simulation that offers an interpretation of the landscape that can reflect desires as well as fears. It mediates our visual experience in the same way that virtual reality, remote viewing, gaming, social media feeds, and cinema do. A feedback loop is created between what we imagine and what we produce through these forms of visual representation until it is impossible to discern which came first. This back-and-forth between technological and analog simulations of the landscape is at the heart of my process. I work from captured images found on the internet or in my camera roll, put them through a series of digital manipulations, and bring them back into physical reality through the slow and intentional process of painting. The lush, painterly quality of my work stands in contrast with the hollow flatness of digital space, and brings the image back to a tangible place. The result is no longer the natural world of our lived experience, but a projection of something that does not exist as we remembered it. It is an attempt to hold onto beauty as it breaks down before our eyes.

BIO

Cristi Rinklin’s paintings, installations, and works on paper explore the back-and-forth between technological and analog simulations of the landscape. Rather than faithful representations of the natural world, her work manifests as illusory composites; environments situated between geographical, virtual, and psychic space.

Rinklin received her MFA from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 1999, and her BFA in painting from Maryland Institute, College of Art in 1989. She has exhibited her work in galleries and museums throughout the United States for over twenty-five years. She has had numerous national and international exhibitions in galleries and museums, including solo exhibitions at the Newport Art Museum, the Fitchburg Art Museum, and the Currier Museum of Art, and her work has included solo and group exhibitions in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Baton Rouge, Seattle, Rome, Florence, and Amsterdam.  Her paintings have been included in the 2010 and 2012 Northeast edition of New American Paintings. Rinklin is the recipient of grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Berkshire Taconic Artist’s Resource Trust, and the Jerome Foundation Fellowship. She has been awarded residencies at the American Academy in Rome Visiting Artist and Scholar program, and the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts. Rinklin is a Professor at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, MA, and she lives and works in Boston.  Her work is represented by Ellen Miller Gallery in Boston.