Art on Campus - Christina Ondrus
CAPS SMALL ART COLLECTION
CHRISTINA ONDRUS
Parallax Painting: A Square is a Diamond to Infinity, 2009
Christina Ondrus
Silver Enamel and Day-Glo Paint on Shaped Canvas
50 x 168 inches
Location: Math / Computer Information Sciences Building, First Floor
Parallax Painting: Convergence Skew, 2009
Christina Ondrus
Silver Enamel and Day-Glo Paint on Shaped Canvas
50 x 168 inches
Location: Math / Computer Information Sciences Building, First Floor
Christina Ondrus is an artist whose work wanders a liminal space where science, philosophy, and mysticism seek to understand perception, phenomena, and our place in the universe. Her series of shaped canvas paintings, 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 extended shapes and large-scale call attention to the space of architecture, and allow the viewer to investigate a revealing of the object in space. As one moves around the painting, perspective shifts become intentionally exaggerated; the outer form appears dramatically different when viewed from the right, left or center. The painted surfaces also appear to change depending on the angle. Silver metallic areas reflect light, wall, or the viewer in the act of viewing. Contrasting use of radiant paint furthers this shift. Each thick canvas edge is painted with a high-intensity fluorescent paint. Initially this appears to be the glow of a light-source, but it is in fact an unexpectedly warm and reflective shadow produced through paint. This fluorescence charges the canvases with illumination; they appear to hover and radiate light. These formal elements open philosophical inquiries of phenomenology and the sublime, but moreover, ask the viewer to experience. Through the construction of these objects, the artist hopes to bring the viewer into a focused awareness of the sensations of perception. Another reference present in the series is Frank Stella’s early polygon paintings, which marked a moment where painting as object and painting as illusionistic image representation were able to coexist. Michael Fried noted Stella’s early work as a potential bridge between the image of representation and the object of minimalism in his essay, “Shape as Form: Stella’s Irregular Polygons.” Moreover, historically this moment became the epicenter of a dualistic feud between transcendence and literalism in art. The artist’s interest in this moment lies in the possibilities of simultaneity and ambiguity - for art to reveal the plurality of perspectives located in the flux of perception and culture. The shaped canvas paintings therefore function in terms of parallax and paradox - to acknowledge the relative position of a point of view where seemingly simultaneous contradictions may coexist and inform one another. The work hovers in a space of decisive ambiguity, simultaneously invoking skepticism and belief, clarity and illusion, and ultimately, a reckoning with the directness of phenomenological experience and the possibility of transcendence.
Christina Ondrus received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and was a 2010 artist fellow with the Terra Foundation for American Art. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions throughout Los Angeles, including shows at JOAN, AWHRHWAR, Monte Vista Projects, Machine Project, Artist Curated Projects, Public Fiction, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, among others. Her projects have been featured in The Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, Artforum, Art 21 Blog, Artbound, Frieze, Hyperallergic, New American Paintings, and X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly. Ondrus is also the founding director of KNOWLEDGES, a curatorial initiative that has produced two site-specific exhibitions at Mount Wilson Observatory. First in 2012, then again in 2017, KNOWLEDGES at Mount Wilson Observatory presents a constellation of cosmic-oriented contemporary artwork and performances on the grounds of the historic astronomical observatory located in the San Gabriel Mountains, outside Los Angeles.
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