Selected Work by Mixed Media Artist Krista Svalbonas

Installations by Krista Svalbonas.

Krista Svalbonas is a Chicago-based mixed media artist. Her studies lead her to a BFA degree in Photography and Design from Syracuse University and an interdisciplinary MFA degree in Photography, Sculpture and Design from SUNY New Paltz. Benefiting from her extensive media knowledge, Krista enjoys experimenting with traditional materials in unexpected ways. She is heavily influenced by urban environment and focuses on spatial relationships and architecture when developing her abstract pieces and installations.

Migrants by Krista Svalbonas.

Svalbona’s “Migrants” series began with photographs the artist took in the three locations she called home over the past eight years – the New York metro area, rural Pennsylvania, and Chicago. Taken with a digital camera, camera phone, and point and shoot, each image is a visual sketch of the genius loci of the landscape at a particular moment in her history. The images have been cut and reassembled in sets of three, creating hybrid structures that reinterpret and reinvent architecture, disrupting space, light, and direction. “Migrants” turns an analytical gaze on the architecture of my past and present while offering a personal reflection on the nature of home, explains the artist.

In the Presence of Memory by Krista Svalbonas.

“In the Presence of Memory” explores the architectural vestiges of a far more ancient industry – agriculture. The disappearing vernacular architecture of barns in rural Pennsylvania reveals their varied European lineages – specific structural elements reflect the building traditions of the home countries of the immigrant families who built them. For the past year I have been traveling throughout my home state to document these agricultural structures: abandoned, re-purposed, or – occasionally – still in use. These photographic images have become the source material for this body of work, says Krista.

Project 8 by Krista Svalbonas.

Project 8 is an in-depth analysis of a group of Section 8 housing in Jersey City, NJ, the Brunswick Estates. In “From Bauhaus to our House,” Tom Wolfe describes the history of places like the Brunswick Estates, when the European aesthetic of Bauhaus and De-Stijl manifested itself in the United States as worker housing. For this series, I chose to work in cold wax and oil on industrial felt, whose industrial uniformity and raw materiality echoes the values the Bauhaus movement saw in simple architectural materials like stucco and concrete.

Installations by Krista Svalbonas.

To amplify the original architectural referents, the artist creates integrated installations, incorporating both the completed panels and the interior architecture of the space that surrounds the work. Large-scale site-specific wall drawings directly embrace the panels, extending their compositional framework and pigmented surfaces, and engage the architecture of the surrounding space, responding to flooring, corners, staircases and windows.

[Images courtesy of Krista Svalonas.]