Natalie Christensen

Los Angeles Center of Digital Art’s, "Ten Photographers to Watch"

May 19, 2021

Photographer Natalie Christensen’s enchanting focus is on banal peripheral landscapes unnoticed by most. Based in Santa Fe, New Mexico and influenced by her 25 years as a psychotherapist, her work features commonplace architecture and streetscapes and favours psychological metaphors. She deconstructs these scenes to colour fields, geometry and shadow. “Sometimes I get a glimpse of the sublime in these ordinary places.”

Christensen has exhibited in the U.S. and internationally, including Santa Fe, New York, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, London, Berlin and Barcelona. She recently took a one-week cultural tour of the United Arab Emirates, invited by the UAE Embassy to join a delegation of architects, architectural photographers and curators.

She led photography workshops at The Royal Photographic Society in London and Meow Wolf in Santa Fe. Christensen has participated in site-specific projects at Iconic Standard Vision Billboard, Los Angeles; El Rey Court, Santa Fe; University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; and Peckham Levels, London.

Named one of the Los Angeles Center of Digital Art’s "Ten Photographers to Watch," Christensen is the recipient of several prestigious awards. After exhibitions at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana and the University of Texas, Tyler, her work was purchased for their permanent collections. Global media have taken notice, with features in, among others, Xi Draconis Books; LandEscape Art Review, United Kingdom; Better Photography Magazine, India; Art Reveal Magazine; Site Unseen; Lens Culture; All About Photo and Women in Photography. Christensen has also been featured in Magazine 43’s Issue 8 in 2019.

You Can’t Get There From Here (c) Artwork International

What are you working on at the moment and what is the goal?

“My time is very focused on upcoming exhibitions in Paris, Copenhagen/Malmo, Fort Worth and Santa Fe. I am making new work, but mostly as a way to relax from studio tasks. My goal is to show my work in a way that most authentically expresses the intention of it. Fortunately, I am working with some fantastic people who are helping me realise the vision.”

With the pandemic causing most people to work from, how did it affect your 'quiet time'? or has this made creating more productive?

“It has been a very productive time in making work that directly relates to my experience of the pandemic. There have been some obvious limitations on ways to spend time, and those restrictions it has allowed for a deeper focusing of my thoughts and narrowing of focus.
how has this been? We are hopeful that it has expanded despite the pandemic and it would be a great learning experience for all to see and understand how it affects artists. It has been wonderful! My collaborator, Jim Eyre and I have created a new series called VIRALSTATES/COVIDSCAPES. This includes 9 photo-based altered images, 3 photo-based sculptures, and a film. We will be showing this work in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the end of this year. The pandemic drove us deeper into our practice together and we both drew heavily on the emotional experience of watching the pandemic unfold around the world. We did our best to channel that feeling of helplessness into our creative process. We live in separate parts of the world so we are used to working remotely on our projects, however the pandemic added a new element to the experience in ways we never imagined.”

Even at time of a pandemic, creating didn’t stop. Natalie and Jim Eyre did a collaboration project called . They proposed this work to the Royal College of Art, and have been doing guest lectures and critiques that all stem from this piece.

roof rendering for Mexico City—Shifting Scapes

In the universe of Instagram, the international friendship and artist collaboration between Jim Eyre (UK) and Natalie Christensen (USA) began in 2017. Through DM conversations they discussed their observations of exhibiting their art on Instagram and the psychological effects of that practice. Their correspondence blossomed into a collaboration in which they built art pieces that respond to the often-fraught practice of sharing work in a virtual space that wasn’t built with art appreciation in mind.
In the latest iteration of their collaboration, Jim and Natalie created a single large-scale mural. SHIFTING SCAPE(S) is an idealised manifestation of a social media hyperscape and its accompanying profound psychological effects. Through the artists’ use of familiar and contemporary urban objects, it is at once both a visual contemplation of the negative emotions and disorientation that often mark our immersions into these unreal spaces, and a call to analyse the resulting frustrations, complications, and disappointments we experience in these commercially-mediated spaces that present themselves disingenuously as free, freely accessible, and ultimately beneficial.
Beckoning us with bright colors and multi-directional illuminations, the mural – like its subject –is always on. The familiar objects and contexts allow us to contemplate voyeuristically the (dis)connection and pseudo-intimacy we recognise as found in lieu of meaningful relations with others, sealed off as we are bodily, and constrained in how we communicate.
The mural is also an articulation of something else that is fundamental in our shared experiences online: the feeling of aimlessness, of being without a map or direction. There are almost no objective indicators, no GPS, no road signs; no way finding, no centre, nothing to comfort, ease or settle us. There is nothing to tell us we are headed into an isolated back road of self-doubt, a vortex of shame, or an experience that may be way beyond what we bargained for. Reflecting on its subject matter, SHIFTING SCAPE(S) – as a 10’ x 20’ installation – is designed to transform, decompose, and ultimately disappear. The piece is an exploration of the conundrum around the ephemerality of their work and the disposable nature of art on Instagram.
Intentionally situated across the increasingly porous boundaries of interior and exterior spaces, and open to the progressively unpredictable natural elements and the destructive energies of contemporary late Capitalism.

-short artist statement on Shifting Scapes