Christina Shmigel

Lives and works in St Louis, MO

Artist statement

Christina Shmigel I like to work with what is. Culling imagery and materials from my workaday surroundings, I build immersive sculptural installations. Born to Ukrainian displaced persons in NYC, and peripatetic ever since, unsettled between cultures and languages, I ground my practice in place and place-making. Sensibilities inherited from the refugee context - repetitive hand labor, reiterative use and re-use, gleaning and re-purposing - underpin my practice; themes of loss and longing, isolation and community, dislocation and locality emerge in my work unbidden. My installations begin in the wonder elicited by encounters with things so commonplace as to be nearly invisible: plumbing pipe, cardboard moving boxes, tin cans. I’m compelled to bring that sense of wonder into visibility, to give form to the uncanny lodged in the ordinary things with which we surround ourselves. I am fascinated by how our material world is inscribed with our ineluctable human need to create meaning and significance no matter the circumstances.

Artwork

• The Load, 2023. Bicycle, laser cut modules from cardboard moving boxes, plastic string
• this rickety blasted beautiful world, just as it is, 2023. Corrugated cardboard modules cut from moving boxes, reflective cloth, tin cans, packing tape
• this rickety blasted beautiful world, just as it is, 2023. Corrugated cardboard modules cut from moving boxes, reflective cloth, tin cans, packing tape
• this rickety blasted beautiful world, just as it is, 2023. corrugated cardboard modules cut from moving boxes, reflective cloth, tin cans, packing tape
• this rickety blasted beautiful world, just as it is: the load, 2023. Bicycle, laser cut modules from cardboard moving boxes, plastic string
• This frightened, blasted, beautiful tender world, just as it is, 2022. Laser-cut packing boxes, tin cans, Styrofoam, toy bicycle and other materials
• this frightened, blasted, beautiful tender world, just as it is: walkthru as drone, 2023. Video of mixed media installation
• The View in Fragments: The Recycler, 2011. Glass vitrine, cardboard, milk paint, wire toy made for tourist market