Craig Hall Gallery: May 6 - 10, 2024

The Crawlers by Christine Tomasino

In the formative book of my childhood, Gregor the Overlander, there exists an underground world that houses animals a hundred times their normal size. As a kid, I imagined how thrilling it must be to know these animals, up close and personal. I took a particular liking to the roaches - known in the book as "the Crawlers." Fiercely loyal, quietly courageous, and grossly underestimated, the Crawlers of Gregor soon became a representation for all insects in my mind. Now, as an undergrad at Austin College, I've been lucky enough to have the chance to explore my passion for insects and the sciences, taking entomology last fall and moving on to assist in entomology research after graduation. It seemed only right to honor this passion with my senior show.

What I love most about insects is hard to pin down. On any given day, my fascinations shift between their anatomical form, behavior, or life cycles. As a consequence, my work over the past months has, too, been in flux. These changes manifest in moves from medium to medium and subject to subject. Some days, I am inches away from my work, my entire field of vision filled with my current project. Other days, I am constantly stepping back, watching my work and its subject from afar. These different modalities of completing my pieces have led to drastically different representations of my insects. Born out of my desire to remain as close to insects as possible are my ceramic pieces, Cow Killer and Mutillidae, both representations of velvet ant anatomy. When I'm fascinated with an insect from afar, I'm working in a much more abstract way, filling in gaps of my knowledge with how I imagine it might be that my subject lives and breathes. It's then that I end up with pieces like my series of eight scanner prints, all of which were made as I tried to embody the insect as I moved it across the light of the scanner. It's in these works that my own feelings and interpretations of the insect come through the most.

Just as the object of my work is subject to change based on the ebbs and flows of my interests, so too is the medium I work with. My process is rarely medium-driven. Rather, I gravitate towards media that will best suit the work I have in mind. This is evident, first, in my scanner prints; 1 could think of no better way to document imagined movement. In my Generations paintings, too, I chose my medium last. For a thing so grand as entire life cycles, I wanted a substrate large and imposing. Nothing is more so to me than a seven foot painting - especially one hanging from the middle of the ceiling.

I'm perfectly aware of the way I talk about insects: it's obsessive, loving, unrelenting. Though I am grateful that my art major has provided an outlet for my passion, I am not sure how I will reconcile my academic background with my newfound career goals. So, The Crawlers is a testament to what I love, to the ways my interests are varied and conflicted. At the precipice of the next phase of my life, it is a reminder of the beauty in evolution.