Exhibition: Cristi Rinklin - Ecologies of Perception

Ellen Miller Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Cristi Rinklin’s solo exhibition: Ecologies of Perception. This new body of paintings explore the futile nature of how we capture and save memory in a time of great uncertainty and ecological crisis.

The fugitive landscape has been a consistent motif throughout Rinklin's work. Rather than faithful representations of the natural world, her paintings manifest as illusory composites; environments situated between geographical, virtual, and psychic space. While witnessing the natural world changing radically in real time, Rinklin beautifully constructs a visual space in which both loss and comfort co-exist

In her newest body of work exhibited in Ecologies of Perception, Rinklin harnesses the full potential of painting in all of its form and materiality to create complex visions of known spaces in flux. The back-and-forth between technological and analog representation of the landscape is at the heart of her process. Rinklin begins her images as digital screen captures based on her own photographs, that are subjected to a process of digital manipulation and then brought back into physical reality through the slow and intentional process of painting. Paint pours that dissolve into abstraction seamlessly combine with sumptuous brushwork of leafy foliage, rock formations, and woodland paths. The lush, painterly quality of her work stands in contrast with the hollow flatness of digital space and skillfully returns the image to tangibility. 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. As Rinklin states, “It is an attempt to hold onto beauty as it breaks down before our eyes.”