By Amy Modesti
The second time was the charm for upand coming painter and visual artist, Karryn Cristi. Friends, family, and patrons gathered together to support Cristi during her opening reception for her sophomore art exhibition, Up Close And Personal, The Works Of Karryn Cristi. It was held Friday, September 15, 2017, at Eden Advisory Services And Café in Loudonville, NY. A Cropseyville, NY native, Tamarac High School alumni, and current HVCC Fine Arts major, Karryn Cristi, as she likes to be called, is allowing her viewers to discover what drives her to become the person and artist that she truly is within the Capital Region arts scene through her “up close and personal” paintings, screen prints, and mixed media works.
While her debut exhibition, Face To Face With Karryn Cristi, demonstrated how important it is to stay outside the box and create the face in anything that has meaning to a person’s life, “Up Close and Personal, The Works of Karryn Cristi” further explores the heart and soul into the person that Cristi has truly become, not only as an artist,but as a human being. Viewers were able to become see part of Cristi’s personal soul as shown through her series of five painted, mixed media collages that she had made in her Two-Dimensional Design class. Through Class (collage), Cristi uses spiritual guidance as a means to figuring out what her true passion really is and what she is destined to do in her life. A white piece of paper with a line from Luke states: “Choose a passion that will last”. Cristi documents and questions her thoughts on that line.”What are you known for? Who is your being? That is your passion.” Through her own thoughts and beliefs, Cristi has decided that her true passion and career lie in the arts and she uses painting and spiritual guidance in God as a means to create these personal pieces that hold significance to who she is becoming. Sweet (Collage) is based on Cristi’s love for chewing gum, shown in the painted gum wrappers that were pasted on the paper, and also attending a day trip to MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York City as seen on a receipt that she had saved from her trip to the museum last year, must have been a sweet, fun trip that she had enjoyed with her other art majors.
An Untitled (Collage) piece that features a cutout of a cell phone and a house allows viewers to make their own assumptions as to how the use of technology, especially the continuous use of cell phones, have affected our homes today. With increased use of social media and with more people using cell phones to communicate with people, the cell phone has made an impact on the home life for the best (or worst).
The main dining room of the Eden Advisory Services and Café housed various paintings and other mixed media work that had made an impact on Cristi’s life. Along one wall was a series of four pieces, Money (Screen Print, Acrylic on Canvas), Black Cloud (Acrylic and Oil on canvas), The Fruit (Oil on canvas), and Atomic Bomb (Oil On Canvas) were part of a Deconstruction assignment that Cristi had worked on as part of her Painting 2 course. The joining of the crumbled money on the cloth canvas, in conjunction of the abstract painting, the enlarged grapefruit attached to the atomic bomb, symbolizes that sometimes, money can either be sweet and tasty to most people but it could also be the root of evil and destruction. On the larger café wall sits two recently completed paintings that hold a truly personable connection to Cristi,”A Piece of Me” (Oil on canvas, 10’x10″) and the large “Mother’s Day, Every day” (Oilon Canvas), as well as three others works. A Piece of Me consists of a close up detail of a group of colorful and dying sunflowers that are all grouped together on the canvas.Cristi’s favorite flower is the sunflower. The sunflowers are also even more significant since it was the same kind of flower that her mother had given to her during her first exhibition opening reception. The sunflowers, both living and decaying, are being repeated in the sepia-toned, under-painted backdrop of Mother’s Day, Every Day. Along the foreground is the body of a nude figure as seen from the neck to the bottom of the feet; the self portrait of the artist. Water is flowing down from the top part of the neck and dripping down to the bottom of the feet creating a pool of water that is reflecting the shapes of the leaves and the sunflowers that are behind the body. As the body cries, the sunflowers are weltering and suddenly,the painting becomes more impactful and meaningful for the artist as faces the fact that the connection that she once had with her loved one is decaying.
Up Close and Personal, is currently on view at the Eden Advisory Services and Café until Saturday, September 30, 2017. Patrons can like “Karryn Cristi” and”Eden Advisory Services and Café” on Facebook. Patrons can stay tuned to what is happening at the café on their website at http://www.edenasc.com.