Marika Christofides

Marika Christofides
Lexington, Kentucky, USA

STATEMENT

My work abstracts the structures of bio-scientific knowledge production, representing questions of identity, ontology, and epistemology through a feminist lens. I collect midcentury femininecoded print ephemera: greeting cards, decorative decals, and recipe books–which I use to create digital collages. Through a process of repetitive mirroring, images of objects like flowers and aprons acquire an otherworldly quality and become removed from their original context. I translate these digital collages into print-based works, primarily using CMYK processes like photolithography, silkscreen, and risograph printing.

My prints, installations, and artist books are characterized by a graphic sense of color and design. I draw inspiration from the aesthetics of biological life under a microscope, using bilateral symmetry, replication, and self-similarity in my compositions. By situating my works within installation environments, I extend the act of collaging to the gallery wall. This allows me to emphasize the physicality of the prints, building a world around them that suggests relationships of parasitism and symbiosis. My work is an homage to the beautiful, strange, and unknowable in the natural world.

BIO

Marika is a visual artist residing in Lexington, Kentucky. She collects illustrations from feminine-coded mid century print ephemera, which translates into digital collage and then print-based works. Her colorful prints, installations and artist books abstract the processes of bioscientific knowledge production, representing philosophical questions of identity, ontology, and epistemology through a feminist lens. She holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Carleton College, and she is expected to earn her M.F.A in Studio Art from the University of Kentucky School of Art and Visual Studies in May 2022. From 2013-2019, she worked as an associate acquisitions editor at the University of Illinois Press, where she acquired scholarly manuscripts in anthropology and science fiction studies. Her work has recently been exhibited at 48 Hours of Neukölln in Neukölln, Berlin; Artist Image Resource in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Grand Valley State University; The Lexington Art League; Utah State University; and Transylvania University.

ARTIST CONTACT

[click to email]
www.marikachristofides.com

IMAGES