Christine Tarkowski is an artist working in a variety of mediums, formats and collaborative conditions. Her artistic output includes; sculpture, architecture, printed matter, photography and song and ranges in scale from the ordinary to the monumental. Equally variable is the scope of production, incorporating the making of permanent public structures, propositional drawings, cast glass models, textile yardage, temporary printed ephemera, and musical choirs. Many of her works point toward the flotsam of western culture relative to systems of democracy, religion and capitalism. Those systems often intersect with or concern themes of conversion, salvation, and belief and are malleable systems relative to a believer’s desires. Recent works are in pursuit of the abstract, drawing on history, craft tectonics, and archetypes. She employs methods of dimensional abstraction to evolve narrative elements that refer to dissolution of order through employing alchemical processes.
Her solo exhibitions include; Chthonic Void at Devening Projects in Chicago, Whale Oil, Slave Ships & Burning Martyrs at Priska Juschka Fine Art in New York, Imitatio Dei at the Museum of Contemporary in Chicago and Last Things Will Be First and First Things Will Be Last at the Chicago Cultural Center and has been included in exhibitions at; the Corning Museum of Glass, Carrie Secrist Gallery, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Socrates Sculpture Park, Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design, RISD Museum, and The Renaissance Society.
She has created commissioned projects for; Millennium Park Foundation, Manilow Sculpture Park at Governor’s State University, Mass MoCA, DCASE and Public Art in the City of Chicago, Franconia Sculpture Park, Socrates Sculpture Park. She has been the recipient of grants from the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, the Creative Capital Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, Franconia Sculpture Park Grant Jerome Foundation and the Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media, and been awarded residencies at; the Tacoma Museum of Glass, Pilchuck School of Glass, Dflux Detroit, J.M. Kohler Arts in Industry Kohler WI, OxBow Saugatuck MI, Roger Brown Studio New Buffalo MI, and Cite´ Internationale des Arts in Paris France.
Christine is a Professor in the Fiber and Material Studies Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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