Colleen Ringrose

 Ringrose surpasses mustache-on-the-Mona-Lisa humor with a level of sophistication in the unobvious and beautiful way she overlaps her forms.

"I work very intuitively," Ringrose said. "I let them tell me the stories

Their sterile, unfamous faces are at the mercy of Ringrose, who demonstrates a modern change in social rituals.

Her layering of images and their interlocking complexity documents the disappearance of space - breathing room - between people.

Her process, "part ancient beeswax technique, part Photoshop," is itself a comment on modernism. The encaustic-cased ink floats in photographic perfection, trapped in the milky wax, giving an ironically solid feeling to these visual metaphors.

by Isabel Halbach

StarNews 2009