Design Credit

Artist Bio:

Christina Empedocles, a San Francisco local and MFA graduate from California College of the Arts, employs realist and trompe-oeil (optical three-dimensional) techniques.

Christina Empedocles' wax pencil drawings make use of obsessive realism as a means to explore the nature of memory, nostalgia and perception. Her work accumulates and assembles found objects and images, and creates a series of representations of representations. The images stand in for the things she has lost touch with over time and reveals the great distance from artist to source. By painting what is obviously a facsimile, she monumentalize this distance between herself and the original, using the intense act of looking as a futile means of getting closer to the things she represents.

The truth that emerges in Christina Empedocles work comes from an innate passion and a freedom to experiment and perfect this style. Also, San Francisco has everything to do with her work. It is where she became an artist, where she was educated, and where she started her adult life. In a recent showing at the spectacular new Alphonse Berber Gallery in Berkeley her work was hailed as stunning both technically and intellectually. Keep an eye out for this incredible local artist or try strolling through the UCSF campus looking for her joyful "flock" mural.

- Giuseppe A. Alagna

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