Cristina Gonçalves

About the Artist

MFA Printmaking, University of Connecticut BFA Painting & Printmaking, Virginia Commonwealth University

Artist's Statement

I make figurative drawings, prints, and paintings that explore aspects of a private existence in the context of my own life as an American woman. I incorporate my cultural history, my lived experiences, and information I learn through the media to develop figures and portrait heads, through which I try to hint at or reveal notion of a "true self." My work is inherently dark, examining those aspects of personality that are most often kept private. I favor printmaking techniques that allow for chance in my images. Rather than focus on making large editions, I prefer to use print matrices as a method of pushing an image in multiple directions. I'm interested in the private/public dichotomy, and the "mixing places" on the body where the two are comingled. I want to tap into something widely felt and understood by people, transmitting that thing through my work, so that viewers can feel a connection or recognize something in the figures that I make, which are not based on models of photographs, but rather are based on a vocabulary of features I have built over years of figurative drawing practice and self portraiture. These people don't exist, so the viewer is free to associate whatever they wish. I think of them as existing in a dreamspace below the surface of consciousness, floating up into the picture plane, which acts as a "skin" between my own public and private spaces.