As the bottom drops out

Cristi Rinklin on creating "Revenant," in her show "Ecologies of Perception" coming to Ellen Miller Gallery

Cristi Rinklin, “Revenant,” 2024. Oil and acrylic on aluminum. 48 x72 inches. Photo by Will Howcroft. All photos courtesy Cristi Rinklin.

The sublime is always a double-edged sword, part awe and part terror. Cristi Rinklin’s paintings tear apart the known world in ways that reflect the slippages we sense as the climate heats up and digital realities accelerate. Her new exhibition “Ecologies of Perception” opens at Ellen Miller Gallery on Friday, May 10.

Cristi’s epic depictions of nature echo Hudson River School paintings, but “sublime” in the 19th century reflected a ripe, eternal majesty full of possibility – some danger, but more potential. Cristi’s paintings evoke, as she notes below, the bottom dropping out. Digital tools she employs have so shaped the way we see that soon, rather than photographing gorgeous landscapes, we’ll craft AI interpretations of them. The tangible world slips away even when we’re standing in it.

But painting is slow. And paint is tactile, goopy, slick – whatever a good painter like Cristi wants it to be. Here, she walks us through the evolution of “Revenant.” The detail shots alone suggest alluring discrete works: the varieties of paint application, the layers. The sense of something just beyond our grasp – maybe because it’s moving too fast for our sluggish human nervous systems to grok, or because it’s too immense for a person to conceive. Maybe it’s because time is not linear and all the past and future of the little upstate New York copse she began with come together here, on an aluminum panel. I don’t know, other than that in Cristi’s worlds, nothing holds fast, except paint.

Cristi writes:

My work begins with an initial image, often a photograph of a specific place, that I digitally alter with the end result of a painting in mind; meaning that the filters and changes I apply to the image in Photoshop and Procreate are ones that speak to the way I paint.