Based in New York City, Christine Gedeon uses a sewing machine, fabric and paint on raw canvas to invent plots that are neither pure abstractions nor representational landscapes, but navigate between interpretative poles. With a limited palette and through an improvisational approach, she investigates aerial drawings and maps and renders familiar yet implausible space, allowing the viewer to stray from presumptions of traditional topography. Moreover, these large-scale works contain subtle tension as Gedeon unfurls the dichotomy between analytical and “masculine” subject matter with appropriated “feminine” materials and process, adopting a sewing machine as a mechanically precise drawing tool.

In her most recent work, she delineates a history of New York City’s urban evolution, researching areas having gone or going through major changes with Google Earth and archival data. With a tangible, she completes the work pointing to a heterotopic, neither here nor there vision of New York; an unreality based on a utopian inspired ideal.

She dives deeper into relationship between urban development and memory. Gedeon purposes that individuals develop a narrative to recall ephemeral space as our identity changes with our landscape: through war, natural destruction, or urban planning. The subsequent rebuilding both “as it once was” as well as a complete modern reconstruction ultimately suppresses memory seemingly creating a sense of utopia.

Gedeon also is translating this idea into profound installations that mimic the multiple layers of empirical observation of human psychology and evolutionary theory, while they construct the “physicality” of our environment. To Gedeon, a crumbling wall and peeling paint depict abstracted aerial landmass. She integrates existing architectural nuances with three-dimensional threading to attain a way to merge canvas with installation.

Born in Aleppo, Syria, Gedeon was raised in northern New Jersey. In July 2011, she participated in a two-month residency on Governors Island through galleryELL. Her work was included in a Biennial at the Bronx Museum in 2011, after she participated in the Artist in the Marketplace program (AIM 30). Gedeon won an Emerging Artist’s Fellowship at A.I.R. Gallery in 2005-06, where she had her first solo show. Other solo and two-person shows include: Chashama in Harlem, CAS Arts Center, Livingston Manor, NY, And/Or Gallery, Dallas, TX, and the The New Art Center in New York. Selected group show include: Kulturmöllan, Lövestad, Sweden, The Arlington Museum, Fort Worth, TX, and DIVA Fair Miami, Miami Beach, FLA. Her work was featured in an article on female artists in Art in America, July 2007, reviewed in The Dallas Morning News, and in The River Reporter, in Livingston Manor, NY. She received a BA in Fine Arts and Art History from SUNY New Paltz in 1995.