Artist Highlight: Christine Cortes

Meet Christine Cortes, a Bakehouse artist whose photo-based practice explores alternative and non-traditional processes of image-making, printing-making, book-making, and installation.

Using 35mm film, Christine’s work is rooted in “post-documentary photography” and inspired by literary and philosophical frameworks that investigate notions of truth, identity, and certainty through fragmentation. Using experimental methods of photography and printing, they seek to represent different versions of reality.

Christine’s work will soon be on view in our Swenson Gallery, as part of the upcoming exhibition Strange Natures that opens on Thursday, April 10th.

Can you tell us about your artistic practice?

I am a photo-based artist. My practice begins with creating images using film photography, often playing with transparencies, double exposures, reflections, and layering and then producing the work using alternative methods of printing and installation. My practice is rooted in “post-documentary photography” and is inspired by literary and philosophical frameworks— including magical realism and deconstructivism— that allow me to investigate ‘truth’, identity, and certainty through fragmentation. 

For my newest body of work, loosely titled Divinidades Atrevides, I decided to develop a more intimate relationship with my camera, documenting self portraits by focusing on slow, intentional image-making and experimenting with blurring the line between single and double exposures. Creating this body of work entailed processing the film in large batches after several months, allowing me more time to reflect on the compositions of the photographs. Many of the images were created from intimate moments, the divine timing of light and body, and seeing the land as an extension of myself reflected back into the image.

Tell us about a personal artistic project or body of work that you are currently excited about.

I am currently working on further developing Divinidades Atrevidas, a new series of self-portraits that move between past and present, documenting my personal stages of growth, depression, grief and healing, death, and spiritual work tied to my ancestors and the land we come from. This work coincides with my personal practice of transgenerational healing. This series began in 2021, an emotional and transitional year for me—at the time, I decided to start focusing on self-portraiture and lean into an undeniable intuition. I did not know that the very week I began this journey would also be the week of my father’s passing. The initial images of this series were taken in the same hours that my father passed away. All of the processed images created in this project, as of now, have been documented in divine timing and an intuitive manner through my day-to-day life. This year, I am excited to explore methods of physically producing images using experimental printing techniques for a larger installation. I would love to have my first solo show highlight this series.

Simultaneously, I have also have spent the last four years completing an archival book titled An Informal Eulogy that indexes 72 years of my father's life as a self-taught painter and immigrant Colombian who left Bogotá in the 1960's for "The American Dream.” Positioning myself as the "archivist,” I have spent hours organizing slide film and restoring images of his paintings, tracing oral histories of friends and family, and personal anecdotes of my life growing up. When I'm finished with this process, my intention is to create a publicly accessible book and archive of my father's cataloged work.

Tell us about how you have developed as an artist since you began working at Bakehouse. 

After The Summer Open residency finished in 2021, I found myself really growing as an artist in so many different ways. To be honest, at the end of that year I was a bit burnt out and had taken time to myself to process the grief that I had compartmentalized. Slowly, I began feeling ready to physically make things again. I began the archiving process of The Darkroom at Bakehouse, and it truly was a safe haven for me in my artist practice. It was a place where I could slow down, focus on the chemicals, and feel peace as I developed all the rolls of film I had spent months storing.

As I continued making work, even within a months-long process, I found a new confidence in my stride. I once again fell in love with my multi-step process of making art, and I felt the courage to continue putting in the effort during those early stages of An Informal Eulogy and Divinidades Atrevidas. I also found myself exploring other mediums, such as ceramics, papermaking, cyanotypes, and even joining a metal band to create new music with friends. I also began collaborating with more artists and organizing different events with friends in the community, which really fed back into my practice. I spent these last few years trying to find different ways of integrating my art practice into a larger practice of making positive impacts in the communities that were important to me. 

The digital print lab was a place where I could continue producing works for the series “Por Este Lado También Hay Sueños” that I had started producing during the Summer Open, which ultimately led to me being invited to have my work in The Frost Art Museum's Summer Exhibition How We Remember in 2022. It was truly an honor to be a part of that exhibition, curated by Amy Galpin, and that was in part due to Bakehouse introducing us during the residency program. That body of work was a combination of photography and alternative printing methods, which involved physically transferring images onto Plexiglass. This technique is still a part of my practice, and I will continue developing it for future works.

I have always been the type of person to thrive best when I have different ways of connecting with the community. There have been times when developing these works felt solitary and introspective because it involved looking into my family’s past, while also documenting the present through my self-portrait series. Sometimes the process has been very emotional or difficult to talk about with others. Very few people in my life knew exactly what I was working on during this time or what the images looked like, because I was so engaged in the slow process of developing a visual language in my work—I did not want to force the projects to become something they weren’t ready to be.

In May of 2024, I took over as facilities manager for the digital print lab at Bakehouse, which also became the first facility at Bakehouse that became accessible to non-resident artists. As an associate artist at the Bakehouse, this was really exciting. This space gave me a unique opportunity to connect with other local artists in Miami, especially when they are at the stage of producing their works. All of these conversations and genuine moments have deeply influenced my practice, and both of my ongoing projects have progressed tremendously since then.