More Than Human: Cristi Rinklin

September 19 – December 27, 2025

In More Than Human, Boston-based artist Cristi Rinklin, depicts a natural world that exists freely outside the realm of human interference and is capable of radical transformation. The artist creates a “landscape with a will of its own, gorgeously and violently changing beyond our control.” Rinklin’s process involves using digital screen captures of her photographs, which are then layered and digitally manipulated. The resulting composite images serve as references for the paintings. Pours of fluid paint are combined with a slow buildup of lush brushwork to reveal environments that contain abstract passages, along with realistically rendered excerpts of the natural world. The artist states, “My paintings manifest as illusory composites; environments situated between geographical, virtual, and psychic space.” Rinklin explores the dynamic and transient quality of landscapes, through images that convey shifting perspectives, fluctuating light, seemingly broken moments in time, and unexpected deviations of color.   

The Maine landscape served as inspiration for two works in the exhibition. The tree line at Sand Beach in Acadia National Park—with its uprooted trees and stretches of eroded soil—is the subject of the paintings Here After and Vanishing Point, both created in 2025. In Vanishing Point, hazy bands of desaturated colors alter the landscape, while shifting light emphasizes fragmented strata of rocks and tree roots. The artist was struck by the “drama and beauty of the site” and an essence of “wildness and volatility” caused by the impact of prior storms.  

There is an overarching mysteriousness in these selected works, as if the viewer is experiencing environments with an unfamiliar and newly derived heightened human sense.

Cristi Rinklin received her MFA from University of Minnesota, Minneapolis and is a Professor at the College of the Holy Cross.