Bind Contour: Christina Quarles

This week on Blind Contour we’re sitting down with Christina Quarles, our final interview from ArtCrush 2019¬. In this audio profile we check in on the artist and discuss her current practice, composition choices, and goals within her abstract, figurative paintings. Legibility teeters on the edge of lack and excess; when we lack information about a thing, it is vague. However, as information accumulates, the risk for contradiction increases and legibility tips into ambiguity. As a queer, cis woman born to a black father and a white mother, Christina Quarles engages with the world from a position that is multiply situated. Her work is informed by her daily experience with ambiguity and seeks to dismantle assumptions of our fixed subjectivity through images that challenge the viewer to contend with the disorganized body in a state of excess. Christina Quarles (b. 1985 Chicago, USA) currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2016 and holds a BA from Hampshire College. Quarles was a 2016 participant at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. She was the inaugural recipient of the 2019 Pérez Art Museum Miami Prize, and in 2017 she received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. She will have a solo show at the Hepworth Wakefield Museum in October 2019. Recent exhibitions include: But I Woke Jus’ Tha Same, Regen Projects, Los Angeles (2019); Always Brightest Before Tha Dusk, Pilar Corrias, London (2018); Christina Quarles / MATRIX 271, UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley (2018); Made in L.A., Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Trigger: Gender as a Tool and as a Weapon, New Museum, New York (2017-18); It’s Gunna Be All Right, Cause Baby, There Ain’t Nuthin’ Left, Skibum MacArthur, Los Angeles (2017); No burden as heavy, David Castillo Gallery, Miami (2017); Fictions, The Studio Museum, New York (2017); and Reconstitution, LAXART, Los Angeles (2017); among others.