Co-curated by artist Brett Amory, The Fourth Wall is pleased to present emerging artist Kristen Wong's first solo show.  Wong (b. 1994) is a biracial Chinese-American artist who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area.  She jokingly and affectionately describes her most formative, teenage years as a time spent hiding in a computer supply closet being raised by first generation programmer parents. It was a period spent borrowing her father's cameras to pass the time and "stay sane in the suburbs." As a result of an upbringing defined by the need to take a camera everywhere she went, Wong still obsessively collects, archives, and hoards the moments and memories of her day to day existence using her cell phone camera and the screenshot function on her iPhone. 

Her solo show at The Fourth Wall, “would you trust a flower that bloomed in a darkened room?”, is a photographic collage series of mixed media images of botanicals, interior and exterior mental landscapes that Wong developed during her time as a Graduate Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County. In her art practice, Wong uses destructive and additive mark making and rendering as well as decorative techniques that are heavily informed by the history of classical and expressionist painting. In addition, she incorporates collage and found elements to transform her personal archive of memories and emotions captured in low resolution 35mm film and iPhone photographs into large works of art--pieces that are larger than life both in scale and resolution.

Wong sees photography as a way to understand and capture both the small minutiae and the big transformative moments of every day life. In choosing to make photographic work of domestic and personal imagery at such a large scale, her practice is something that demonstrates that the emotional undercurrent of the human condition and the overall affect and feeling of the common events and vignettes of our day to day lives can become something so big, vivid, frightening, and electric that the emotions one feels can consume the mind. Wong explains, "The 'darkened room' series is rooted in the idea of metamorphosis for the better or the worst despite life’s chaotic wheel of fortune type of a hand and in times of emotional turmoil and unrest - to change and heal in life’s own darkened room".