About me

Christopher Shields is an artist based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, whose work weaves a story of inclusion, desire, and authenticity through painting, drawing, and digital manipulation. Using religious iconography and illustrative imagery, this artist creates resolute pieces that explore the nature of self and our connection to our unique understandings of the divine. Christopher's practice reflects a commitment to personal truth expressed in the raw emotion of gesture. His paintings and drawings evoke a universal sense of queer identity-questions of faith and belonging rise to the surface through powerful forms, overlapping expressions of pleasure and pain-linking the experiences of those within the LGBTQ+ community to those outside of it. His digital manipulations capture a hint of nostalgia, yet carry a bold reminder of our collective humanity. This work invites us to explore our individual selves while also witnessing the evolving ways that art and technology intersect communities and define history. 

"My latest work, Technophobia, explores the influence of Artificial Intelligence on the contemporary world of Fine Art. After experimenting with feeding my digital photo collage series into an Ai app, I manipulated the random generation of avatars it came up with to produce an image which I then painted onto a large scale. As a relatively new technology, Ai doesn't appear to understand the skeletal structure of the human form, so I enjoyed the push and pull of creating one for the canvas. I also embellished details in the final painting to make better sense anatomically, while keeping the slippery and deceptively skewed perspective of the generated image I used for reference. The generated image struck me as being both beautifully seductive and darkly menacing, which created a rich metaphor of my experience as a gay man in a predominantly heteronormative culture. These qualities resonated with my life-long pursuit of creating work that rides the line between extremes, and also echoed the experience of dealing with how our society chooses to revile or celebrate members of the LGBTQ+ community."

CV, Bibliography, Professional References, and Exhibition History available upon request.

Contact Details: c.shields5@icloud.com 612-805-3059