Christine Wallers is a nonrepresentational artist who values the imperfect, ritualistic, and contemplative process of hand-rendering. Creating temporal installations and intricate works on paper, she uses repetition, accumulation, and material multiplication whether she is working with thousands of copper wires and magnets, hundreds of handmade darts, or multiple modular paintings. She creates densities with delicate materials whose cumulative impact of layered fragilities troubles societal assumptions of strength, visibility, power, and resistance. Light and movement allow her works to constantly shift, suggesting a physical awareness and empathy in the viewer’s body. While her inspirations often come from atmospheric and phenomenological moments in nature, her art finds itself in a genre between conceptualism, abstraction, and formalism.
commentary
"... her earlier work at Experimental Sound Studio and A + D Gallery displayed a signature mix of intelligence, finesse, and subtlety...During the day, Death of a Moth used the abundant light of a large south-facing window to illuminate pendulous sail-like forms burnished with ink. After dusk the storefront became an evanescent spectacle of projected images, angular volumes, and copper wire cats-cradle—all shimmering and accompanied by mysterious sounds audible through the door’s mail slot." — Lise McKean, 2016, Bad At Sports
"Wallers' two-dimensional drawings have a density that is entirely formal. Rich in mark making but essentially delicate and fugitive in a way that is only possible with graphite, we feel that a moment of form will disappear in an instant — erased and replaced with another accumulation of marks. In her paper-based series, marks swarm or flock together to produce a powerful collective body which moves as a single entity, but in which each mark has its own weight and importance." — Jennifer Shaw, 2014, "On Big Drawings" Catalog, A + D Gallery
"'Sea Level's' strength is its quiet, reserved mood, an echo of the region's resilient Scandinavian forefathers. Running parallel to the fir planks, it appears and disappears in changing light, mimicking the shifting hues of local skies and water or the mirage-like glow of wet sidewalks." — Judy Wagonfeld, 2005, Seattle Pi
"Contemporary art that has as its subject contemplation, and, essentially, prayer, is open to accusations of New Age cliche and risks having its intention far override execution. But like Wolfgang Laib, Wallers and Peters managed to create a space that invited viewers to appreciate perceptual increments, here the subtlety of metal on metal and barely heard sound. You had to lean in, to slow down. You were quietly conscious of your own heightened attention to the work as you experienced it." — Aline Brandauer, 2001, Art in America
"This is German conceptual/earth art at its best. But Wallers is more than just one of the Beuys. If Air and Excavation is a lesson in metaphysics, it is also a meditation. Its intimate reflections on the basic elements of existence invite the viewer's welcome intrusion." — Richard Tobin, 2000, THE Magazine
contact
christinewallers@gmail.com