Christina Valenzuela
What is the nature of pain and suffering? How does the body define the human condition? How does psychological makeup affect our identity? The objective of my studio practice is to use painting and drawing to investigate these questions, exploring the experience of pain and suffering through the lens of phenomenology, mental illness, and morality. I am interested in the tension between the mind and body which defines the human condition, creating imagery that emphasizes psychological states exhibited by the figure. I consider how the multiplicity of being—our many selves made up of mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical components—resists interpretation.
At this point in my artist journey, my meeting point for phenomenology, religion, and psychology is through the story of Saint Christina the Astonishing, the Catholic patron saint of mental illness. Her story is unusual—she performed bodily mortification as penance, torturing herself in a number of grotesque ways, and was thought to be possessed, thus viewed as insane. I process my relationship to Christina the Astonishing in my most recent work—by using myself as a model for her figure, I consider her tortures through virtual embodiment as an empathetic gesture to explore fluidity of being, immanence versus transcendence, and the meaning and purpose of pain and suffering.
