Christine Gray’s paintings depict models she creates using common craft materials, the works become fantastically abstracted scenes based on objects domestic and kitsch. “I represent landscape through several degrees of mediation (first by building modest micro-sculptures, then through painting) using themes of failed geometry, failed architecture, and failed illusionism.” Gray explains. “This removal from the real reflects what I find to be a prevalent contemporary anxiety toward not only so-called ‘nature’ but also toward ‘the real’ itself.” In the Washington City Paper, Maura Judkis writes that “each oil painting has been given the same treatment as a baroque bowl of fruit, but the elaborate dioramas that she bases the paintings on are far more whimsical and surprising. The picture that emerges from these bits of plastic and wire looks environmental, rather than synthetic�Pet Net, a painting of a collection of lucky rabbits� feet strung from a climbing-wall carabiner echoes the form of a bushel of bananas. Gray is at her best when painting the pure geometry of her tenuous toothpick-and-pipe-cleaner structures, so delicate that they look as though a breeze in the gallery will send them tumbling.” Read more.
“Christine Gray: Spring Thaw,” Project 4, Washington, DC. Through May 24.
