Christina Mesiti is an artist working throughout the mountain west, originally from Phoenix, Arizona. A Fulbright scholar to Mexico, she has shown in places including UCLA, Cal State Long Beach, Locust Projects, Tyler Park Presents and the Brand Library. She has taught at Deep Springs College, Pitzer College, Pomona college, and Pepperdine University. She has attended residencies at the Edward Albee Foundation, Township 10, Art Farm, and the Vermont Studio Center. In 2020, she co-founded the Emplacement Society, an open collective of people taking trips together outside to experiment with collective, somatic knowledge creation at the intersection of art and the environment. She received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University.
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In my work, which encompasses sculpture and photographic records, I intend to feel geological and botanical time by using my body as a medium for entanglement with plants, rocks, water and weather.
My practice requires that I live nomadically, within public land. In the field, I walk and cultivate attention to forms, materials and processes of a place and then cast my own body into the rock, the mud, the sediment along a shoreline in ephemeral ways—making molds from the negative and positive spaces of my own body. I use materials like ice, pine resin, charcoal, and sand to allow my body to hold and be held by the landscape and photograph the changing result.
The moment of touch, material, body and light becomes caught/collapsed in the photographs. Mirrors allow me to touch or hold things I shouldn’t be able to – the horizon, the sun – or to continue entangling the edges of beings and spaces. Gestures of holding, touching, and offering become ways of feeling loss and change within and alongside a place’s own transformation.
The sculpture and outdoor work operate in a material cycle of body, earth, tree, stone, and fire. It confuses found and made, complicating a sense of agency behind the materials and processes. When viewed together, the work offers a poetic sequence of possibilities for holding a porous, shifting self within a changing landscape. It engenders a sense of fluid belonging and shared resilience between changing bodies.
My practice requires that I live nomadically, within public land. In the field, I walk and cultivate attention to forms, materials and processes of a place and then cast my own body into the rock, the mud, the sediment along a shoreline in ephemeral ways—making molds from the negative and positive spaces of my own body. I use materials like ice, pine resin, charcoal, and sand to allow my body to hold and be held by the landscape and photograph the changing result.
The moment of touch, material, body and light becomes caught/collapsed in the photographs. Mirrors allow me to touch or hold things I shouldn’t be able to – the horizon, the sun – or to continue entangling the edges of beings and spaces. Gestures of holding, touching, and offering become ways of feeling loss and change within and alongside a place’s own transformation.
The sculpture and outdoor work operate in a material cycle of body, earth, tree, stone, and fire. It confuses found and made, complicating a sense of agency behind the materials and processes. When viewed together, the work offers a poetic sequence of possibilities for holding a porous, shifting self within a changing landscape. It engenders a sense of fluid belonging and shared resilience between changing bodies.