Bio:
China Faith Star is a 21st century contemporary artist living and working in Olympia, WA. Her diversely imaginative and complex work addresses various socio-political and socio-emotional concepts through process-based series across genre/medium. She has exhibited and performed in over 25 cities nationally and internationally with work in both public and private collections. As a medium rich visual artist, writer, composer, performer, China is concerned with the language and process of artistic expression as a mode of ritual, through which larger concepts are explored throughout all parts of the creative process, from conception to reception. Whether addressing spiritual, community based, environmental, or political concerns, the micro and macro of the applicable process is what identifies each series as unique to itself and origins, and defines the applicable medium, yet the thread of her conceptual intention, to evolve and enlighten culture towards a new perception, weaves throughout the work to create a patchwork of modalities for the individual observer to draw from.
Artist Statement:
The essence of all my artwork, across genre, is the ritual of process: small run or continuous series exploring sensory aesthetics through a slipstream of medium and concept. I have been building upon my work as a ritualistic artist since early childhood, working to not just create objects, but something that carries a more ethereal content imbued into the form, like a talisman or artifact. I cannot remember a time when I didn’t see creation as a means to construct a new existence through intentional magic, a way to escape both the traumatic and the mundane, to seed an evolutionary message for others to water and harvest. The act of making in its own right is a type of conjuring, birthing, manifesting something that previously did not exist. Evolution. Revolution. Invention. Portal making. Working the line between material & energy. Relinquishing control. Artist as machine as humanity as a force of nature. For this reason, I never really thought about building upon the lineage of the spiritual political feminist artists I am inspired by, artists like Hilma af Klint, Louise Bourgeois, Georgia O’Keefe, Faith Ringgold, Nikki de St. Phalle, Dorothy Iannone, Marina Abromovic, Alex Grey, Laurie Anderson, Meredith
Monk, Vivienne Westwood, Betsy Johnson, Anne Sexton, Luce Irigaray, Nikki Giovani, Allen Ginsberg, Suzzane Ciani, and so many many more of every genre, gender, ethnicity, etc.; instead I have focused myself as an artist on how to fill the voids, on trying to create something that hasn’t been done quite this way before and to further illuminate the abundance of possibility. The result of this intention/method manifests in a desire to lose oneself, allowing your daily thoughts to quiet, and the mind to expand through a meditation of form. Creating parameters to follow in my practice, I similarly lose myself in the making process. Each series starts with a concept and a set of rules then evolves from there.
This painting, I See A Synapse Taking Form, is from the series:
EVOCATION + TRANSMUTATION
The rules:
Discard copious amounts of paint in abstract layers, apply pattern to color & varying stripes to black & white. Be joyous. Think about the happy and beautiful things in the world.
The mixed media paintings in this series explore the interplay between color and pattern (the gradient spectrum of possibility) juxtaposed graphic black and white (dualism). My technique is the process of mark-making, pouring, brushing, scraping, repetition, trance, releasing a desire towards the referential, allowing things to happen in a collaboration with the unknown to manifest the purest abstraction of form, a composition fully realized. Layers of paint hide and synchronize in an agglomeration of evocative landscape / mindscape / dreamscape that welcomes observers to reference their own imagination. I see many things framed in the details and overall image. What do you see?