Artist Statement by Christina Shook
"intersection of photography and painting"
My work investigates how we navigate an impossibly complex world of information. I’m interested in how we create our own stories based on facts but also using our emotion, desires, fears and memory. I also work with ideas of how much agency an individual has to create their own narrative. I explore this process through the intersection of photography and painting.
I begin with a photograph—a concrete, instantaneous record of light and fact. That unaltered image is dense with information yet represents only a split second in time. As a lifelong professional photographer, I have honed the ability to tell a story by composing a frame; I know all too well how the photographic image can be completely true and also a lie.
With paint, time stretches out and I feel my way through the facts of the photograph. I deeply connect to the physical act of laying down paint. As I layer paint over the photograph, the literal details begin to merge with the paint, distort, and eventually the photograph may collapse as a reference.
Each brushstroke is a negotiation between what was recorded and how I experience it now through the durational and physical process of painting. This act mirrors the way we obscure or create "facts" to build an understanding of our individual lids. It is an alchemy - two things that create a third richer and wilder thing.
| Biography
Christina Shook creates work that is a conversation between paint and photography and explores human agency in navigating a complex world. She was educated at Michigan State University where earned a BA in journalism (1992) and photography and did her MFA studies at San Francisco Art institute (1998). Christina has been a commercial photographer for over 20 years and has published two books (Chicks on Bikes and Life Lessons from Friends with Cancer) and has worked with national publications, international institutions, and high profile companies. She received a grant in from Laguna Beach Festival of Arts. She has had 3 solo exhibitions and of her work in the past two years and has participated in over 30 group shows, most recently Art Prize in Grand Rapids Michigan. She lives and works in Orange County California.
