Press Reviews
"The Waves", L'Atelier-épicerie d'Art, Compiègne, France November 13 - December 2 2012
"Woman, brushes, colors. Female post-raphaelite. Feminist and revolutionary. Chrissy Howland is 25 years old and yet she is already pregnant with a past life: that of a child from Maryland, a student of Fine Arts, a musical performer, a voracious reader, a voyeur ogress of the works of Basquiat or Morandi, Bacon or Hockney. The work of Chrissy Howland is itself in the sense that Flaubert said "Madame Bovary, it's me". She is the woman who commits suicide in the bathtub from which evanescent and pink bubbles, so pink, escape. She is a ragged Cinderella, a prisoner of myths and fairy tales, who assign the woman to the imposing figures of lascivious, submissive, obedient, beautiful and dumb femininity. She is Deneuve, open mouth, archetypal figure of doll inflated desires of all those eyes that devour her. She is Tomboy, angry, questioning the genre, that of being and that of the painter. She is Lolita lost in the jungle of bottles of Guerlain, stunned by the sweet and sweet smells of gloss, terracotta and pink varnishes, so pink ... Chrissy Howland's work is an acidulous orgy, indigestion by dad's candy, it is the dialectical reversal of Barbie thought. Wallpapers torn off, pallet of a spoiled child, mouths snapping: everything in the work of Chrissy Howland is digested, spat out and behind the fragile effluvium of perfume, there are the blood rust, intimate liquids, gall. The Waves, the title of this exhibition, first in France for this young artist, is borrowed from Virginia Woolf. The same one who committed suicide in a small English town without wave and yet too low to drown. The work of Chrissy Howland thus questions the neurosis and hysteria, claims it without taming it. She eats the princesses and rehabilitates the rose, so pink. The work of Chrissy Howland is to return to original sin (Ezekiel 18: 2, "The parents ate the green grapes and the children had their teeth annoyed"), and to rephrase it: "the mothers were goinfrées of Chamallow and their daughters had their veins cut.'." -Ludovic Sellier, Director of L'Atelier-épicerie d'Art (translated from the original french) "Chrissy Howland: An Installation of Paintings & Drawings", Baltimore (MD), Creative Alliance, Oct 15-Nov 1 2009
- "Stepping into Christina Howland’s disorienting installation of paintings and drawings is like tumbling into the sketchbook of an ambitious but troubled mind... raw, for sure, but dripping with talent. Emaciated figures possess a jittery eroticism that’s equal parts Egon Schiele and Sid and Nancy, while diaristic scribblings ache with pain and anger, the twin pillars of youthful expressionism."
-Jed Dodds, Director of the Creative Alliance
- "2D work should be exhibited as a kind of installation," Christina Howland declares. "One that provides the feeling of walking into someone"s brain or underwear drawer. I think of a ten-year-old girl in a trailer park, drawing pictures of beautiful houses and happy families, turning her trailer park into a place she really wants to be, see, feel, experience." Accordingly, Howland’s disorienting installations of paintings and drawings - replete with sex, drugs, and a fantasy world steeped in their attendant addictions - depict a troubled, ambivalent relationship with the Pleasure Principle and the idea of a perfect life, positing her comforts as both beautiful and self-destructive. Her exhibit explores dependence as a multifaceted lifestyle: emaciated, Schiele-like ?gures ?ght and have sex with alien carnality, stylized icons of pills and hearts clutter picture planes, female forms are collapsed into muscular collections of holes and legs, and dead-eyed self-portraits convey a complicated sense of peace. The result is an ecstatic purgatory - a gorgeous and garish No Man’s Land with its own intuitive moral compass. "Both the negative and the positive are balanced in such a way that you cannot point out the pretty or the ugly," Howland says. "[They are composed] in a dreamy kind of way that causes confusion within, but wakes you in a half sweat with complete clarity."
-Joseph Martin, citiesandsigns.com