Nicole Krstin | touch

Reception + Artist Talk: Saturday, October 14 @ 3 - 5 pm. Artist talk begins @ 3:30

RSVP your attendance to responses@wallspacegallery.ca

Wall Space Gallery is proud to introduce touch, the first solo exhibition of painter Nicole Krstin. Krstin works fluidly between acrylic painting, digital art, and film photography, often combining working processes between mediums to open new avenues of perception. Using layered and juxtaposed imagery Krstin allows her subjects to transition between the digital and the material world.

In touch, Krstin draws new inspiration from a previous series of her film photography. This series stemmed from a period of time when Krstin was living between New York and Toronto; constantly transitioning spaces and leaving those she loved behind. To distill the essence of existing in two places at once, along with the longing that accompanies it, Krstin began exploring double exposures; capturing photos of her and her partner’s hands in one city, overlaid with second-exposures of her hands in the following city. Through this series, she began building intimate moments of touch from impossible distances.

The photographic elements are pulled from my 35mm multiple exposure series titled Living in Two Places, 2017...The transparent ghost-like hands appear as phantoms longingly reaching for each other.

- Nicole Krstin

The works in touch extrapolate on Krstin's use of double exposure by combining them with her hallmark layered and manipulated digital renders of her painting palette. These environments of emotive colour create a connection between paint and body, the material and the immaterial. Once the material world is transposed into light, whether in pixels or through the photographic process, its presence and meaning changes. Similar to the functioning of memory, it becomes the ghost of a reality; time-stamped with our own record of emotion and vulnerable to manipulations that might re-write its initial significance.

  • Soft Burn, archival pigment print on Hahnemüle, 24 x 30 in. Framed by Wall Space

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  • Afternoon Touching, archival pigment print on Hahnemüle, 24 x 30 in. Framed by Wall Space

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  • Trust Me, archival pigment print on Hahnemüle, 24 x 30 in. Framed by Wall Space

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Within Krstin’s ongoing bodies of work is an interest in reiteration and the pathways this process opens to creation and meaning making. The works in touch are grouped together into ‘chapters’ of experience, with Perceive Me functioning as the epilogue. In Perceive Me, the expansive environments of digitized paint and playful interactions of transparent bodies present throughout the exhibition works collapse inward into a self-contained form.

Though it has echoes of symmetry, subtle differences
create movement within the central formation lending it a distinct presence as a growing and lively organism. There is a calm in Perceive Me that suggests a final and complete coming together of previously disjointed parts.


- Tiffany April, Curator

touch Catalogue

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Nicole Krstin is a self-taught Filipino-Canadian visual artist whose current body of work imagines the kinetic and complex process of cellular mutations as they metamorphose to create new fragments and figures. With a focus on the internal mechanisms of transformation in the body, Nicole explores and brings forward the inherent and ubiquitous nature of change and evolution. As part of Nicole’s practice, paint left on her palette is dried, scanned, and meticulously edited to create a catalogue of source material for digital compositions and paintings. Nicole’s work can be found in private collections in Canada and the United States. Nicole currently lives in Calgary, Canada with her husband and children.