The Tufts gallery is not known for housing particularly famous artworks, and it is a place on campus to which many people will probably never venture. Cristi Rinklin's installation, "Nuvolomondo," however, is well worth the trip to the Remis Sculpture Court.
Rinklin brings to her piece inspiration from a variety of sources that transcend distance, time and subject matter. In "Nuvolomondo," we can see Salvador Dal? mixed with the stained glass of Gothic cathedrals, decorative elements from both Japanese prints and 18th century homes, and biomorphic forms fused with clouds. The result is a stunning and vibrant installation that traverses and commands the entire room, while maintaining the intricacy and depth of a more traditional painting.
The piece is an installation, a combination of stained glass windows and wall painting. While the glass painting is intricate and has a depth that seems to push out from the glass, the wall is painted only with a silhouette of these forms. Although they contain the same colors - bright pink and teal that are purposefully unnatural and "techno," as Rinklin called them - the forms are simplified and more pattern-like, creating a clear distinction between windows and wall.
"Nuvolomondo," which means "cloud world" in Italian, was initially commissioned as a way to revamp the Remis Sculpture Court for its 15th anniversary. Rinklin, in the lecture she gave Oct. 20, talked about the idea of a "theatrical interior" as a means for viewers to access something extraordinary, an idea harkening back to Baroque cathedrals. She wanted to create something to heighten the drama of the space, and she achieves this by incorporating the entire room into the piece, rather than staying within the confines of a frame.
This theatrical interior concept could be found all over 18th century French homes that extended the motifs of their artwork into their interior decoration. While emulating older church and home spaces, however, Rinklin wanted at the same time to explore how modern technology has influenced and changed the way we see and imagine the world around us.
Rinklin certainly uses technology to its fullest to create her art. On a trip to Rome, she took hundreds of photographs of the frescoes on the ceiling of the Borghese Museum, whose artist, Mariano Rossi, used foreshortening with great skill to achieve a sense of three-dimensionality. Rinklin then digitally edited her pictures, making it so that the individual forms were no longer distinguishable, but the compositional pattern and depth remained.
This hazy mass forms the background of "Nuvolomondo" onto which she then added the more definitive, but still abstract forms. All the prints that she created in her studio and on her computer were then projected onto the walls and glass of the sculpture court, which she then traced over and painted back in to create the final product.
While Rinklin does project her own unique voice via technology, her more traditional inspirations manage to shine through as well. The rolling forms on the stained glass, which could be perceived either as clouds or part of somebody's GI tract, are reminiscent of many of the forms in the works of Salvador Dal?.
In fact, Rinklin discussed how Surrealism as a movement encouraged encounters with new subject matter and ways to depict them, and how she hoped that her work achieves the same effect.
She also spoke at length about the use of cloud-like forms in her art, and what those forms have meant in art over the ages. Rinklin discussed their function in Christian art as a way to symbolize access to the divine, or as a graphic element used to link disparate visual elements in Asian art.
It is no wonder, given its diverse meanings, that the cloud motif is so prevalent in "Nuvolomondo." Cristi Rinklin is an up-and-coming artist of the Boston area, and with art like this, it is easy to see why her fame is growing.
