Artist Statement

My work confronts societal gender norms and pushes back against notions of perfection, value, and keeping up appearances. It draws strongly on the entanglement of the home, family, and career, and references history, personal memories, literature, and contemporary society’s chauvinist zeitgeist.   

My work directly challenges the idea of domestic bliss and the female identity. The work references the body in gesture, voids, color, form, and texture. I aim to obscure and hybridize my materials and processes, to rid them of prescribed value. Through this material subversion, I attempt to engage the viewer with the work more fully, while lending a hand to intrigue, secrecy, frustration, and solitude.  My work examines the loss of self to contemporary society’s gender constructs through references to time, material, and bodily tethering.  

I often ask the viewer to interact with the work in an unexpected way through careful placement of work in the gallery setting, which intentionally prevents viewers from fully accessing the work.  Either by placing the work directly on the ground, putting details and pieces just out of the viewer’s clear sight line, or preventing the viewer to access a small section of the interior of a piece, it is my hope that this will help to make the viewer connect with the vulnerable, small, or hidden.

BIO:

Christiana E. Updegraff, a cross-discipline 3-dimensional artist, was born in 1979. She completed her M.F.A. at San Diego State University in 2011.  She also received her B.F.A. in 2007 from Kent State University. Christiana has maintained her studio in Los Angeles for the last twelve years.  She has been creating and exhibiting work nationwide, as well as teaching Fine Art in higher education in Southern California. 

Christiana’s current body of work is inspired by loss, corporeal deterioration, time, uncertainty, fear, and stagnation. She is particularly engaged with objects of human comfort in conjunction with imagery of emptiness and decay. She uses both Sculpture and traditional metalsmithing techniques in combination with non traditional materials to obscure the implications of her chosen media.