KRISTA LEIGH STEINKE

CREATIVE STATEMENT

Inspired by spirit photography and post-mortem photography from the late 19th century, Purgatory Road chronicles my experimentation with the photo medium while exploring the fragility of life. The project takes its title from an actual place where I live in the summer months – a wooded region divided by a dirt-covered path. Photographed on location or composed from specimens collected on walks through the woods, the images collectively describe a sense of place, while capturing myriad cycles of growth and decay.

Rooted in my concern for the environment, the images serve as metaphors for the concept of purgatory as an in-between state; a place where visual and conceptual polarities intersect and become blurry. As part of this series, I collected and photographed insects found on the side of the road. I see these photographs as a type of Momento Mori – a way to honor and memorialize the smallest of creatures that play a critical role in the health of our ecosystem.

Krista Leigh Steinke is an interdisciplinary lens-based artist working in moving image, experimental photography, and collage. Her work fluctuates between the photographic and the abstract to present poetic reflections on time, place, perception, and the interconnection between human experience and the natural world. Informed by various sources (from art and photographic history, science and star maps, memory and the female perspective, to current events and the weather), her creative research often takes a diaristic form as a way to illustrate how the personal, social, and universal intertwine. The plight of insects, the pathway of the sun, a hurricane, a global pandemic – she is interested in both the obvious and more mysterious ways that nature impacts our lives while calling attention to broader issues surrounding the environment and our shared community.

Steinke regularly exhibits and screens her work in museums, galleries, and film festivals across the country, as well as internationally. Her work has received support from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Glasscock Center for Arts and Humanities, and a Fellowship from the Howard Foundation. She has been invited to be a visiting artist at numerous colleges and universities and has participated in several art and media festivals as an exhibiting artist, speaker, or curator. Steinke holds a MFA in Photography and Digital imaging from The Maryland Institute, College of Art, a BFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA in the Humanities from Valparaiso University. She currently teaches at Texas A&M and divides her time between Houston, TX and rural New York State.