44.5 x 54.6 x 6.3 cm
Building on this experience, Stephens became keenly interested in the way human consciousness correlates to natural and cosmological cycles. Inspired by scientific analogies between galactic and neurological activity, and insights gained from mathematical models of mental and emotional processes, she began to infuse her desert-inspired geometric abstractions with symbolic depictions of the patterns that permeate our inner and outer worlds. She continues to cultivate these ideas through her ongoing series,
Transforming the Desert is Santa Fe artist Christa Stephens’ emotional journey through the hard edges of her formative years on the Llano Estacado, a vast tableland that encompasses part of eastern New Mexico and northwestern Texas. She was born on the palisaded plain, which has often been described as “barren” and “desolate” due its lack of vegetation, and was profoundly influenced by the stark geometry of this southwestern desert from an early age. Residing in the area through her twenties, she grew to revere her time on the high prairie as metaphor for personal reflection and transformation.
Building on this experience, Stephens became keenly interested in the way human consciousness correlates to natural and cosmological cycles. Inspired by scientific analogies between galactic and neurological activity, and insights gained from mathematical models of mental and emotional processes, she began to infuse her desert-inspired geometric abstractions with symbolic depictions of the patterns that permeate our inner and outer worlds. She continues to cultivate these ideas through her ongoing series,
Skyscapes of the Llano Estacado: Abstractions from Beyond the Horizon Line.
In these paintings, Stephens visualizes the southwestern sky as a conceptual substrate on which she condenses ethereal qualities of vapor and particles into geometric fragments. Hard edges draw upon the stark beauty of the immense staked plain, while bold, saturated colors dramatize the emotional density of one's journey through the allegorical desert of the soul. Using precisely rendered contrasting elements, she pieces together models of physical and perceptual phenomena, creating a subtractive, yet theatrical “mirage in the desert” description of the human experience.
These works amplify the horizon line between a calcified landscape and the infinity that rises from it; symbolizing the human capacity to thrive in, and ultimately transcend, the desert environments we face from without and within. They invite the viewer to consider that our true identities lie far beyond social and cultural constructs. From this perspective, phenomena that once seemed mythical or theoretical lie within the landscape of heart and mind.
