Christina Ondrus

Region: Pacific Coast

This series of shaped canvas paintings, “Receptive Visualizations and Parallax Paintings”, invokes references to crystalline structures, mystical icons, and diagrammatic images. Decisively shaped canvases utilize two-dimensional perspective, vanishing points, and parallax to generate an experience of perceptual flux. The large scale and extended shapes call attention to the space of architecture and reveal the object in space. As one moves around the painting to negotiate a vantage point, perspective shifts become intentionally exaggerated. The use of radiant paint furthers this shift. Each thick canvas edge is painted with a high-intensity fluorescent paint, which may appear to be the glow of a light-source, but is an unexpectedly warm and reflective shadow produced through paint. This fluorescence charges the canvases with illumination; they appear to hover and radiate light. Silver metallic surfaces further a visual shift, as they reflect both light and images of the surroundings. The resulting contradictions articulate ambiguities of embodied perception and mental cognition and, therefore, question the ability to know.