Cristi Rinklin: Paramnesiac

Cristi Rinklin’s mesmerizing paintings carry the viewer into new and spectacular territories. With their swelling shapes, billowing clouds of smoke, animated rivers, and blankets of fog in bright colors, Rinklin’s landscape paintings have one foot in the familiar real world and the other in a luxurious fantasy world. 

To make her evocative paintings, Rinklin mines and combines images from various sources: canonical landscape paintings from art history, Google images, collected photographs, video games, virtual reality, and her own photographs made with the use of a drone. She creates a digital collage, which becomes the starting place for a separate large-scale painting. The world that she creates in each of these paintings, in the words of the artist, is  “an uninhabited, detached fragment that floats in an ambiguous, abstract space . . . . The combination of tangible realism, abstraction, and ambiguity are intended to disrupt the viewer’s ability to ground or position himself in any particular time or space.” Part fantasy and part phantasmagoria, Rinklin’s paintings reinvigorate and reinvent the tradition of landscape painting.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.