About the Artist:

Katrina Niswander is an internationally exhibiting and collected fine artist, interior designer, and life coach working out of her home studio in Toledo Ohio. She has a fascination with the feeling of home, what we choose to surround ourselves with and what we leave behind. In her fine art practice she uses her vast collection of found photographs as inspiration. Her mixed media paintings are a collaboration between past and present. She takes fuzzy black and white snippets of time and intuitively adds graphic color in an attempt to wrap her head around the complexities of time, memory, nostalgia, and loss in a playful way. Katrina passionately believes in the power of artful living, self-love and the beauty of living your most aligned life. She spends her days painting, leading others through digital consulting and coaching, collecting art & vintage, working on her home, and spoiling her two cats.

Artist Statement:

My artwork begins with my collection of old, forgotten and discarded photographs. I carefully collect and scan in each image to preserve the original and paint on top of archival reproductions. Most of the time I have no background on these photos - zero information at all outside of the image itself. I am fascinated by how we all choose to present ourselves to the world, what we choose to document and share, and ultimately what we leave behind. It's human nature to see a snippet of information and then project and create narratives. As I playfully and intuitively create, I find myself contemplating the lives of the subjects as I weave a new story for them through my work. It's meditative and feels oddly collaborative - integrating what they have chosen to share about themselves in the photo with what I can add with my paintbrush. It bends time, it celebrates these ghosts and adds another layer to their existence.

We take photos as a way to document and capture a memory forever - but even photos fade and crumble, even the digital can become corrupted or lost on old or damaged drives. Even our memories change in our minds over time. Images become grainy and our perceptions modified as we ourselves grow and change. I’ve lost loved ones to brain cancer and dementia bearing witness to how quickly memories and identities can be completely lost. That personal potential lies within my genes. This work serves as a playful reminder to always make time to truly be present and enjoy the simple but special moments in our lives before they become memories : snapshots fading in a drawer or in our modern world lost in the vast sea of images in the cloud. It functions as a totem of our past and of our growth, a reminder to embrace the past while not taking nostalgia too seriously as we anchor in the present and actively build and experience our most beautiful lives. 

Contact:

Katrina Niswander Art & Design // Toledo Ohio // hello@katrinaniswander.com