kristine asta

BIOGRAPHY

Kristine Helgason is a 22 year-old Boston area native graduating this spring with a BFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Montserrat College of Art. Additionally, she has studied at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Otis College of Art and Design. Her work has a wide range of mediums including painting, photography, and printmaking, though she has had a recent focus on mixed media painting. She had her first solo exhibition of photographs at the Epiphany Book Gallery (now defunct) in April 2006. She has worked as a gallery assistant at Montserrat during the Fall semester 2006, volunteered on an event with Arrowsmith Press in December 2007, and interned as assistant-to-the-director and sole web designer for the Gloucester New Arts Festival from Fall 2009 Ð Spring 2010.

STATEMENT

   As I've transferred colleges several times, moved three thousand miles away and back, I've developed an enormous interest in places. I'm interested in the memories I have with places now inhabited by strangers, and the memories of strangers with places I inhabit.
   I am trying to purge memories and experiences while creating visually interesting work. I am attempting to make work that begins as a memory of mine but is open enough to fit the viewer's memories. I want them to be able to choose to see it as a blur of my memory or insert themselves into it. Everyone remembers where their first kiss was, or where they were when they heard some tragic world news-- perhaps even clearly than their immediate reaction.
   My memories often include crafting with my mother, who filled our home with handmade decorations and let me cover it in tissue-ghosts every Halloween, cover the dining table in dollhouses with handmade furnishings, and encouraged me with pottery and quilting classes. This has a large impact on my work as I still hold an interest in the handmade, careful quality of small-scale art as I try to maintain a concept of fleeting memories of events and places. Interiors, landscapes, and architecture play a major role in content whereas a distinctly West Coast color palette (left over from my studies at Otis in Los Angeles) and a love for pattern are important to my aesthetics.
  Recently, femininity has become a significant question and issue in my work, though it does not become the preeminent theme. I am trying to address past worries of my work being seen as passive and associating that with my work being "feminine", by diving head first into the aesthetics of warmer colors and organic shapes. I am also interested in my generation's aversion to feminism and tendency to participate in girl-hate and association between femininity and passivity. This is something I subconsciously struggle with as a woman and as an artist.