I’m in a bus, probably on my way home from kindergarten when I am overwhelmed by feelings of disgust and fear as I pass a drab (nay, frightening), peachy coloured, weatherboard house, with overgrown shrubs, and dark brown blinds, pulled down to the sills. I feel very alone, isolated, afraid. (Even though my mother would have been next to me), I still remember the recoiling, alienating feelings that moved through my body. Since this image and its accompanying sensations have kept returning, decade after decade, has this image been frozen, and thus, remains the same, or has it become my own eternal return (ala Nietzsche), coming back a little altered each time, a little less, or a little more threatening?

For the fun of hanging out with Kristina, I am borrowing the Latin word for home, domus. It is a starting point to think about the kind of ‘paradise’ the word conjures, as well as the way it suggests a protective carapace—a place upon which all our aesthetic and psychological desires are projected. Might it simply be a gesture formed to ward off the unmannered, ugly interiors of those who seem oblivious to the demands of beauty? Or does it act more aggressively, as a kind of personal utopia erected against a denuded natural world, eaten away by industrial profiteers. A kind of forgetting.

Personal utopias come in many forms, falling somewhere between the unchecked madness of the always open door that makes thresholds disappear, along with the possibility of distinguishing friend from foe; or the private fortress, rabidly defended, with gun-power, aggression, nationalistic fervour, flags, fear, and hatred. Even in the knowledge that one person’s u-topic imagination is likely to be another’s menacing evil, the yearning to build/impose may persist, the home, the fortress, the haven… And no matter how fortress-like the dream of domus may be, under judicial-cover, external forces will find their ways to impose, for domus is also the ‘domicile’, the official term that allows for the locating, quantifying, measuring, and taxing of inhabitants…

A feeling of intimacy, I think, is the most immediate response to Kristina’s paintings. Hints of gardens through blurry windows, heightened senses of calm, and faceless figures (thinking, tinkering) on tables. Images of rumpled bedding, birthday cakes, luscious hair, objects of desire, might we disappear into the blue/green/purple expanses of paint, or the moments of pink/red/orange? Are we intruders or collaborators of the quiet events in the paintings?

Selling Sunset,
Owning Manhattan,
Million Dollar Listings (NY),
The Parisian Agency,
Buying London…

Each show is gobbled up with fascinated gobbles. The product is staged, sterile and samey, the prices as high as the barren skyscrapers peddled in Manhattan, with their imposing glass walls and show-offy motives, or as unreal as the French Chateaux and their manicured gardens. A fascination with other people’s homes is an obsession we both share, but it would take some serious therapy to unpack the love/hate that keeps drawing us to them. One thing is certain, these reality tv homes are a long way from the insecurity of renting properties in Melbourne…

While Kristina’s paintings are beautiful images for uncomplicated eyes, it would be apposite to remember that lapping at their frames is the politics of dwelling. This encompasses the difficulty of securing and keeping rental properties in places where owners are protected over renters, and with the persistent awareness that whether renter or owner, we live, write and exhibit on the invaded lands of the Kulin Nation.

Contemporary existence is harnessed to a troubling paradox, encapsulated in Kristina’s understanding that “living entails self-deception”. What she means, I think, is that if we are to keep on living (safely/comfortably), our backs must be turned on the world, while, concomitantly, we must be aware of the horror that persists ‘out there’, or we wouldn’t need to turn our backs on it. This volte-Face, therefore, means we are perpetually slipping into false realities. The popular German concept of heimlich (homeliness) and its ever-present, dark other, unheimlich, is a refrain against over-sentimentalising the ‘lightness’, or rather, the comforting, happy side of home.

“Home is where the hatred is” (Gil Scott Heron, 1971)

Home is where I live inside my white powder dreams
Home was once an empty vacuum that's filled now with my silent screams
Home is where the needle marks
Try to heal my broken heart
And it might not be such a bad idea if I never, if I never went home again…

One way to unpack the duality of light/dark in this series of paintings is to think about the way windows appear in Dwellings—some scenes are looking out to the world, and others, of trees and gardens, appear to have been painted from the street. But all are opaque. They are unlike (for example) a Matisse window where the outside is always brighter, sunnier, seductively so, with his windows forcing the viewer away from rooms (sunless) to distant, brightly rendered scenes. Kristina’s windows are ambiguous, or rather, less celebratory and act more like screens or shields.

Portal (2022) is a figure of a young child standing between what appears to be a bed and a three-paned window. They are staring outside, with their back turned to the painter. While these elements are clearly defined—figure, window, bed—they also recede under a wrapping of bluey-green, painterly abstraction, only to recover form through strokes of yellow (moon? streetlight? bed lamp?) and pools of shady purple (bedcover). The formal construction of the painting means that it drives an uneasy vacillation between figure and abstraction, darkness and lightness, I think the title, Portal is apt for the science-fiction implications it rouses—more than a simple opening/closing, and more like a passing-through with both transformative possibility and fears of harmful deprivation.

—Jan Bryant, July 2024
Art Programme
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