Over the past several years, Chris Corales has lived a transitory existence, moving from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon to Philadelphia to Toronto, Canada within a four-year time span. Corales’ choice of materials—old record sleeves, discarded packaging materials, book binding cloth—lends itself well to an artist on the move. The title of Corales’ exhibition, Imitation of Home, evokes both a longing for settlement and an attempt to make do with a given situation as a surrogate for home. His longing for domestic familiarity and comfort is suggested in the work on view: rectilinear room-like compositions. Migration and adaptation to new surroundings are consistent themes throughout Corales’ recent work. His collages are ruminations on the challenges that accompany a change of environment, but also present a serenity based on the artist’s long periods of solitude—the outcome of being a perpetual stranger.

Corales’ work evokes Constructivist painting by way of found paper collage, selecting his paper based on color and texture and eschewing materials with text and imagery. His collages inhabit a space at once raw and refined where antique surfaces are transformed into a form of abstraction not usually associated with the collage medium, which is often driven by image and narrative. Both his composition and materials conspire to suggest a kind of found modernism, as if decades-old art works have been unearthed in relatively pristine condition except for the aged paper which bears the imprint of time.

Chris Corales (b. 1969) has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions in San Francisco, CA at venues including Gregory Lind Gallery, Luggage Store Gallery, Adobe Books, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, and New Langton Arts. He has shown nationally with Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia, PA; Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR; Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York, NY; Samson Projects, Boston, MA; and the International Collage Center, Milton, PA. His work has been featured in international exhibitions at Pierogi Gallery, Leipzig, Germany and Galeria Zé dos Bois, Lisbon, Portugal. Corales lives and works in Toronto, Canada.