The images on this page are selections that represent the kinds of work and ideas I was engaged with at various times over the past 10 years. It is by no means comprehensive, however I have sought to provide a thorough overview of my conceptual/artistic evolutions over a decade of art practice.
My work from 2010-2020 focused on bodies in transition. Transitional states of being are transgressive, spiritual, and erotic by virtue of being both relational and undefinable. They challenge power structures by refusing to be categorized. They don’t choose a side, embodying multiple types of beingness at once. These bodies depict a visual porosity acknowledging that even the simple act of breathing involves a dense traffic of energy, emotion, pollen, pollution, vapors and viruses which continuously change our internal and external landscapes. They bear the marks of history and cultural conditioning, but also contain, through an eros of transformative encounters, all the possibilities for a new kind of corporeality, consciousness, sexuality, and survival.
A selection of works from this period are included in Beatrice Marovich’s book “Sister Death: Political Theologies for Living and Dying” published February 2023 by Columbia University Press.
—Krista Dragomer, 2020
2020 - Series: Shelf Life
I created the series "Shelf Life" during the isolation of summer of 2020. Compost collection had been suspended in New York City, so I kept my food scraps in the freezer, hauling these frozen bundles to various community gardens and farmers market collections at the end of the week. The frozen scraps, beautiful in their diversity of colors and forms, took on a new kind of presence, an accounting of my movement through my weeks alone, a meditation on the conceptual boundaries between inside and outside. I was also, during this time, teaching an online drawing series and had set up mirrors for a class on self-portraits. Catching images of my own sweating, eating, transforming body in the mirror alongside the defrosting assemblages of compost I'd pulled out of the freezer to draw, the drawings merged. As I observed all the bodies leaking and becoming more fragrant, comingling in my senses and our shared atmosphere, drawing us all together became an acknowledgement of corporeal kinship and the transient nature of the identities we attach to our bodies of food and flesh.
2019 - The Exquisite Arch, The Dancers, Eros and the Deadlock (It takes Two)
A common misread of my work is that it expresses my psychosexual oneness with the world; like, nature is sexy to me, and I’m turned on and at one with all this! And it is true that I am interested in eroticism as a force that connects me to the world, in the Audre Lorde sense of the erotic. But eroticism is not about feeling sexy. It is about powerful encounters with forces of beauty and horror. Sex is a part of this encounter. But the erotic can also be an experience of shock, confusion, disorientation, and disgust. Inhabiting a body deemed female has meant, for me, that I constantly feel the pressure to perform my relationship to eroticism in specific ways. My body is held by a public gaze that wants to shape it in its own image of beauty and desire. In my work I have experimented with this performance, answering these expectations in ways that can elicit a range of responses along that spectrum of beauty and horror, and sometimes, a bit of satire.
small works and large sketches
2018-2019 - Series: Garden Varieties
Heads blossom into ecosystems and disordered limbs tangle and transform as they come into contact with other bodies, forces, and forms of life. Lines of kinship proliferate.
2017 - Series: Flash Blindness
2015 - 2016
Cooperative Ecologies (small works)
Series: My Wet and Wild
Series: Deep Creek
2010-2014
The Open/We Break Down Ourselves
Animating this series of drawings are a host of questions that arise with the breakdown of the phenomenon we call "nature": questions about sex, gender, and bodies; questions about production, reproduction, and waste; questions about animality, bio-politics, and the creatures who refuse categorization as a singular being, hovering between becoming or negating, between life and death. These drawings were made in collaborative conversation with writer / theologian Beatrice Marovich.
A new to NYC artist trying to assimilate her new ecology…
