Chris Maliga

Chris Maliga is a photographer currently based in Boston, Massachusetts. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions nationally, most recently at Piano Craft Gallery in Boston, Nave Gallery in Somerville, Massachusetts, and PhotoPlace Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont, among others. He serves as the Studio Manager for Photography at School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Maliga has also taught courses and workshops in photography throughout New England. He has printed black-and-white photographs for Barbara Bosworth and Mike Mandel. Maliga holds a BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an AA in Photography from the University of Maine at Augusta.

Artist Statement: Dominion

Nature has served as a refuge for me throughout my life, alluring an inquiring mind with its at once tranquil and ever-fluctuating state. For my photographs, I search for secluded locations that lack the tell-tale signs of human habitation. I am as much interested in witnessing the undisturbed passing of time in these spaces as I am in exploring my own desire to be a part of the movements within them. In these places, I am rendered aware of my own fragility. Through performative interactions with the terrain and the adverse elements, I find myself immersed in a sense of both freedom and vulnerability. There are cycles at work within the natural world that seem to us to be endless, but only because they have carried on for so much longer than we have existed. Night passes to day, snow turns to water, vegetation blooms and then shrivels. For the short time in which the shutter is open, my body is a part of these rituals. To me, these vanishing seconds are a welcome source of rejuvenation. By committing that moment in time to the silver of film and paper, it achieves a permanence that neither I nor the weathered ground will ever truly know.