Joseph Christiana is an interdisciplinary visual artist. His mediums include oil, encaustic wax, epoxy resin, and film.
His art is represented by multiple galleries along the east coast.
His films have won awards, procured distribution, and have screened at many film festivals.
He is a published writer and an optioned screenwriter.
He earned his BFA in Visual Art and Design from Rutgers University, Mason Gross School of Art. He currently serves as Creative Director for a New York-based architectural design firm, where his projects have earned myriad accolades. He lives in the New Jersey Skylands with his family.
More information and complete CSV available upon request.
Artist Statements
“Each of these works is a taut negotiation. I set out with an exact vision of what I want to happen on the surface, with a medium that I’ve chosen expressly for its unpredictability. As I work through the piece, I must come to terms with how the moment, the medium, and the process alter my vision. It’s humbling. I make concessions. I guide the work to what it tells me it wants to be, using a blow torch, a palette knife, gravity, compressed air, gravity and so on to coax it, sometimes to trick it.
I find making these works, then, an analog for the act of living itself- expectation vs reality, coming to terms with the limits of your control over circumstance. Or akin to what I imagine performing improvisational music is like- a subservience to the moment.
When all is right, we (the painting and I) find peace with one another, even as the end result often evinces tumult. I find the aftermath of the conflict beautiful, almost always.”
—
“I’ve begun to wonder what it will mean when we shed our bodies altogether. What do we embody then? A manifestation of expression, an extension of the forgotten face, the still hoped for (existence of the) heart.
I am currently interested in seeing that yet unseen fate of the bodyburden re-purposed, the possibility of the human form yet to come, sex-driven sexless, when we might invent our self-image unhindered by vanity, to become an amorphous expression informed mainly by emotion, which is, I believe, the entanglement and conflict of (at least) two impulses, sometimes opposing, sometimes rhyming aslant: love and fear; hate and triumph; desire and inhibition; and so on.
The resulting form, at least as it looks to me from my view in the corner of my home where I sling my paint and wax in the darkest hours, is not unlike the dreamvision creatures of ancients, the ghosts or our personal mythologies who wear their ghosthood only to obfuscate their true identity as pure reflection.
Ultimately, that’s what this is, an attempt at recording that reflection.”
—
“There’s no difference between making art and praying”.