About
Christopher Reiger is a writer, artist, and curator living in San Francisco, California. Originally from the rural Delmarva Peninsula, Christopher attended the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He then moved to New York City, where he lived and worked for the next decade. He graduated from the MFA program at the School of Visual Arts (NYC) in 2002; since that time, his paintings and drawings have been included in solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and South America.
Christopher has contributed art criticism to a number of print and online journals, including ArtCat:Zine, NY Arts Magazine, Art Practical, and Square Cylinder. Essays and short-form pieces about art, natural history, and miscellany are published on his long-running blog, Hungry Hyaena. Additionally, he has contributed essays to exhibition catalogs and books, and more book projects are forthcoming.
Christopher teaches art classes at Root Division, an arts education non-profit in San Francisco's Mission District, and at the Sharon Art Studio, in SF's Golden Gate Park, and has presented guest lectures at undergraduate and graduate art programs about art's relationship to ecology and ethics.
Statement
My artwork is principally concerned with contemporary man's mutable conception of nature and our place in it.
Growing up on the rural Delmarva Peninsula, I became acquainted with the local flora and fauna at a young age. Whether working at field chores, hunting, fishing, or simply playing, my outdoors experiences were akin to the Wonderland exploits of Lewis Carroll's Alice. Carroll's premise, that "things get curiouser and curiouser," guided me through many a childhood adventure. I anthropomorphized animals and cast them as key players in an epic production of which I, too, was a part. For me, as for Alice, the natural world was enchanted and ethical in an unsentimental way.
As I matured, however, my childhood love of nature evolved into a fascination with biology and ethology, a process akin to the broad philosophical and intellectual developments impelled by the European Enlightenment. In the 16th century, educated Europeans began to distinguish between fantasy and fact, between myth and history. They gradually abandoned enchantment and magic in favor of analysis and rigorous experimentation, hallmarks of the scientific method.
Yet this divide between imagination and reason diminishes our comprehension of the world. The English poet and critic John Ruskin alluded to this deficit when he wrote of "the broken harmonies of fact and fancy, thought and feeling, and truth and faith." A complete appreciation of nature requires us to interweave cognition with imagination. My pictures are the observations of a naturalist working at the intersection of fable and fact.
