Christine Turner


Master of Fine Arts in Studio, Painting and Drawing

My investment in abstract painting comes from my embodied experience of abstracted vision. Growing up, I wore an eye patch and was legally blind in my left eye. This disruption to my vision came in the form of overlapping perspectives, blurring, and blindspots leaving me investigating what’s missing and unaddressed in my viewing of the world. Making work in systems of ambiguated truth, disembodied memory, and distorted vision, I explore literal and metaphorical blindspots.

These paintings incorporate visual phenomena, disruptions to sight, and motifs of visibility in response to visual culture. I dance between perceptual and formal abstraction in the blurring of edges, dots rendered with more or less focus, allusions to vision tests, silver paint utilized to create the effect of a mirror, imagery of camouflage, green screens, the photoshop grid, etc. Creating a visceral and optically charged experience for the viewer, I use hi-visibility fluorescent, metallic, and interference paint to create paintings that are simultaneously ‘high-alert’ in their immediate reception and quiet in the way that they require persistent looking.