A cloud of charcoal smoke, laced with small swirls of party confetti, billows above a foundationless building. Some canoe paddlers flee the scene as the ominous structure sinks into a mass of water, in one of Lompoc artist Cristina Kartsioukas’ surreal paintings.
It took several years for Kartsioukas to complete the apocalyptic piece, titled Falling Into Ruin, while working full time as an elementary school teacher and finding pockets of spare time to paint on and off in her laundry room.
“I basically wanted to paint chaos,” said Kartsioukas, whose acrylic artwork is briming with eclectic and subtle imagery, some of which might go unnoticed without a second or third viewing. “I like a lot of artists that have so much going on in their paintings. I like to kind of be able to look at them for a long time and see different things, and I wanted to try doing some of this myself.”
Falling Into Ruin is one of several paintings on display in Kartsioukas’ current solo exhibition—slated to premiere on Jan. 12 and run through March 8 at Shepard Hall in Santa Maria. The show marks Kartsioukas’ first at the venue. Her husband, Ryan Carroll, motivated her to submit her work after hearing about a call for artists.
“I haven’t really exhibited my work very often, and that was one of the things Ryan encouraged me to do,” Kartsioukas said.
Carroll, also an artist, submitted his own artworks for Shepard Hall’s consideration as well and was chosen for a solo exhibit that immediately follows his wife’s showcase, set to debut on March 9 and run through May 11.
While her husband, who works as a full-time chemist at Vandenberg Space Force Base, specializes in paper-cut art, Kartsioukas is a painter and printmaker. Both halves of the couple have an art desk in their home where they chip away at their ongoing projects, side by side.
“We have a couple of desks in our laundry room. Ryan’s table is like the clean table, and then mine has a bunch of paint on it—it’s pretty messy,” said Kartsioukas, who’ll often listen to music or a podcast while the pair work on their respective artworks. “We definitely have a lot of times where we’re just sitting there working together.”
Kartsioukas can’t remember for sure but guesses she was listening to some soft folk songs when she first began work on Falling Into Ruin. The project started as a collage—a collection of scissor-cut photographs from National Geographic and a few different fashion magazines, glued together in one of Kartsioukas’ sketchbooks.
Then Kartsioukas began painting the piece based on the patterns of people and objects she meshed together. One of the reasons the painting took several years was due to Kartsioukas’ tendency to work on a handful of art projects at once.
“I usually will be working on multiple things kind of simultaneously,” Kartsioukas said. “I like to have different types of things to go to. I don’t like to do too much of the same thing.”
Kartsioukas bases many of her paintings on her own collages of photographs, some from newspapers and other printed publications, and others from her own camera roll.
“I like looking for images in different sources, whether it’s me, taking pictures, or just from magazines,” Kartsioukas said. “I love looking at images and finding things and putting them together.”
Some of Kartsioukas’ pieces are based on single photographs, including another piece in her solo exhibit, Goldie—an intaglio print inspired by a portrait of the artist’s grandmother.
Corporate Human, another print on display in the new showcase, was inspired by a photo Kartsioukas took while at a multi-story Fred Meyer—part of an Oregon-based chain of hypermarket superstores.
“I was just blown away by this huge ‘everything’ grocery store,” said Kartsioukas, who wandered into the store while staying in Newport, Oregon.
While going up the store’s escalator, Kartsioukas looked down and decided to take a photo on her phone, knowing she wanted to use it for a piece eventually.
The end result is refreshingly mysterious and leaves room for various interpretations—some viewers might correctly identify the store’s overstuffed aisles and walkways, while others could guess the setting of Corporate Human is some kind of factory, or even a man-made cavern (on first glance, it looked like the Batcave to me).
“I was just looking down at this crazy, surreal space. I took some photos of it. I wanted to use a photo as a reference for something,” Kartsioukas said, “but in a way that would be really intuitive, and imperfect.”
Arts Editor Caleb Wiseblood’s alignment is chaotic neutral. Send comments to cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 12-19, 2023.
