Krystal Hart is an American contemporary artist. Her works employs traditional earth elements and contemporary audio and digital technologies to create intimate communal spaces. Hart’s work explores the role of narrative or storytelling in human relationships, social traditions, and historical subjectivity
I carry on my grandmother's legacy of working with the hands to create meaning, value, community, and dignity by abstracting with various materials. Metaphorically, fragments of our interconnected lives.
The process of abstraction allows me to deconstruct and to build at the same time. It is a simultaneous act of excavation and reconciliation of peace and conflict narratives. Story is my framework. I navigate boundary and spaces within the human experience. Physically. Psychologically. Environmentally. I am interested in these narratives of the mind and in between us as humans as we interact with each other. I explore our humanity and our inhumanity in relation to the self, to one another, and to our surroundings.
I communicate through painting, collage, audio, and moving image. In painting and collage, formally inspired by Nihonga, a 19th century Japanese method of painting, I use natural and synthetic materials that are subjected to trauma by crushing, cutting, heating, and washing away. Works emerge as emotive color fields that balance tumult with delicacy. The interplay of the idea of distress and fragility further reflects variations in our personal and collective experiences.
In my art and in life I work to cultivate more generative interconnections, culturally, socially and globally, through intimate and intentional engagements.
- Created: 2021