* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Christina A. West is a sculptor living in Atlanta, GA where she is an Associate Professor of Ceramics at Georgia State University. She earned her MFA from Alfred University in 2006 and since has extensively exhibited her work across the country in venues such as Plug Projects (Kansas City, MO), the The Bellevue Arts Museum (Bellevue, WA), The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center (Buffalo, NY), the Zuckerman Museum of Art (Kennesaw, GA) and the Mindy Solomon Gallery (Miami). Additionally, Christina’s work has been supported by a grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts, the George Sugarman Foundation, and the Southeastern College Art Conference.
Christina explains her work by saying, “All of my work begins with an interest in interiority—the thoughts, feelings, psychology within our bodies—often highlighting the inherent mystery, or inaccessibility, of interiority. My installations consist of multiple sculptural figures placed together in a gallery space, with the color of the figures, the altered coloration of the space, and, sometimes, the direction of the figures’ gazes suggesting relationships among the figures. The hints of narrative among the figures are open-ended and ambiguous, with emphasis placed on the uncanny experience of encountering these smaller or larger-than-life bodies that are at once familiar and strangely other. I begin with questions about the relationship of the exterior to the interior, the limits of what we can know about other people given that we never have direct access to their interiority, and how our physical encounters with representations of bodies can affect perceptions of our selves. The resulting figures pull us into their fictional realities with a high degree of naturalism and notions of the private made public, while simultaneously pushing us away (or creating a psychological distance) with their unrealistic scales and unnatural colors that assert their object-ness.”
"Christina's sculptures are a clash of roman sculpture and psychedelic art. The addition of neon "footies" on her figures to the slicing of busts revealing pools of color are a kaleidoscope for the viewer's mind. This work makes me happy."
