CHRIS MUSINA

Chris Musina’s work searches for meaning in our relationship to animals and the animal within. Specifically, how we find that meaning through the lens of culture, both high and low. This work quietly interrogates those interactions with special consideration toward nostalgia, failed paradise, melancholy and dark humor. Via life scale oil paintings, and small text and image ink drawings, he is posing questions about ecology, environmentalism, consumption, and the human condition - opening the floodgates to the realm of existentialism, fear and anxiety - but with a nervous laugh. 

Raised between Toronto Canada and Southwest Florida, Musina received his BFA from the University of South Florida in 2004 and his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2012. He has exhibited his work in New York City, Richmond, Portland, Toronto, Raleigh, Asheville, Lexington, and elsewhere. Musina has received awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Culture & Animals Foundation and the Puffin Foundation. His work is published in New American Paintings, Beautiful Decay, Antennae: The Journal of Nature & Visual Culture, among others. He currently lives and works in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and published his first widely available children’s book - The Moth - which he wrote and illustrated during a poetry residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2022.

My work interrogates a visual history of animals - how we look at them and think about them as a part of culture - versus some sort of naturalism. Coming from the position that all we know of animals is a human cultural endeavor, I am looking to places where animals are represented, versus representing animals. This manifests itself in work about animal culture, the semiotics of animals, and discomfort with human animal. I look to a lot of art history, specifically where animals, and human animality figure prominently, but I am also having a conversation with contemporary culture, specifically contemporary animal culture. My work in form and content points backward in a style of painting that refers to everything from Flemish still life to Neue Sachlichkeit, while looking forward at everything from hunting photos and animal rights imagery to pet portraits and memes. In life scale oil paintings and small scale ink drawings, I work to probe the comfortable lines between nature and culture, the wild and the domestic, humor and horror, animals and the animal within.