Ellen Miller Gallery is pleased to announce the representation of Cristi Rinklin. Rinklin has built a significant career exhibiting and teaching in the greater Boston area. Her paintings have been shown in galleries and museums throughout the United States, as well as venues in Rome, Florence, and Amsterdam. She has had numerous national and international exhibitions in galleries and museums throughout New England, and venues in New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Madison, Baton Rouge, Seattle, Florence, and Amsterdam. Rinklin is the recipient of grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Berkshire Taconic Artist’s Resource Trust and the Jerome Foundation Fellowship. She has been awarded residencies at the American Academy in Rome Visiting Artist and Scholar program, and the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts. She is currently a Professor at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, MA. Cristi Rinklin lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts.

In Rinklin's carefully chosen words: We live in a time of great uncertainty, witnessing drastic changes to everything we thought was fixed and permanent. The impulse to capture and save our experiences for future access is a distinct behavior that reflects this cultural moment. Ways in which we store and retrieve images, through memories, dreams, photographs, paintings, or data files are all simulations that offer fugitive modes of recall, subject to breaking down or fading around the edges. A throughline that persists in my work is the idea of impermanence. What is left behind when we no longer exist? Can an afterimage of a memory linger outside of human consciousness, like a signal waiting to be received? I think about these questions as I witness the natural world changing radically, in real time. 

Simulations of the landscape are a prevalent part of our visual culture. Painting is a simulation that offers an interpretation of the landscape that can reflect desires as well as fears. It mediates our visual experience in the same way that virtual reality, remote viewing, gaming, social media feeds, and cinema do. A feedback loop is created between what we imagine and what we produce through these forms of visual representation until it is impossible to discern which came first. This back-and-forth between technological and analog simulations of the landscape is at the heart of my process. I work from captured images found on the internet or in my camera roll, put them through a series of digital manipulations, and bring them back into physical reality through the slow and intentional process of painting. The lush, painterly quality of my work stands in contrast with the hollow flatness of digital space, and brings the image back to a tangible place. 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. It is an attempt to hold onto beauty as it breaks down before our eyes.