Kristina Pray

KriStina pray in Conversation with JessiCa BeCkwith

Jessica Beckwith: Light dissolves materiality and seems to act as a vehicle for sentience or consciousness in your works, creating a sense of presence and transparency, which creates a rich multi-dimensional reality. I wanted to ask you about the ways in which transparency and light offer a window into the interiority of place in your work. Do you feel a connection between the interiority of these spaces and the outer world or collective space?

Kristina Pray: I definitely feel there’s a connection. The spaces I create are a mosaic of places I consume and inhabit, either consciously or subconsciously. The light and transparencies act as layered transitional spaces between the several dimensions of reality I’m depicting.

JB: How do you see this informing the way you see the world? You talk about using a combination of digital media and photography in the process of creating your paintings. I’m curious about how that layering influences your work? Is it purely visual or are you drawing from a phenomenological presence within the images that you’re using to inform your paintings?

KP: Digital imagery has helped me think about depth and color of spaces in an expansive way. I find myself paying selective attention to parts of spaces in the real world the same way I might select a fragment of a found image when I create digital collages. I’m often thinking about how things like a digital texture might translate to a physical texture and vice versa. That visual difference I would say is really important in my creative process. Many of the digital textures in my work have inspired a greater variation in the physical marks I make with paint. It feels instinctual to me now to fluctuate between thinking about elements of a space in a digital and physical form. JB: You’ve spoken about consciousness and/or emotion and ‘liminal spaces of the psyche’ within the environments you create. Light seems to be the fabric that knits your environments together and carries the psyche of the environment with it. Can you speak a little more about that interconnectivity?

KP: I don’t usually start a painting thinking about where the light will be coming from. I feel like that element reveals itself to me later on in the process of piecing together a space. Once that happens I’ll build off of what the painting shows me it needs. I like the idea of certain architectural elements giving off their own light as if the space is a living conscious thing itself.

Kristina Pray

BFA Painting and Drawing

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