Christina Kruse Cuts Her Teeth on Video

A model who cuts her own cloth would be helpful backstage at any fashion show. A model who cuts collages, and storyboards her own videos–that’s just Christina Kruse. “Art, as I’ve said before, is something that for many years, I’ve done largely for myself,” says ageless model and artist Christina Kruse. Now she’s doing it for threeasFOUR, having debuted a new video at their Spring 2011 show. “When I began showing my art work at galleries, a lot changed—scale for one, audience for another,” she continues. “The idea of some sort of gallery video installation started to come up fairly regularly.” She wasn’t yet convinced.

Seasons ago, threeasFOUR, whom Kruse has known for years, asked her about making a film about their clothes. She brainstormed models like Kirsten Owen, Danielle Z, Hannelore Kunts, and Farrah Summerford as actress options. This season, the opportunity again arose, and within a week, she had everything she needed to proceed with “Contours,” including New York-based artist Seth Carnes as co-director. It helps that Kruse herself could put in time as a star.

The black-and-white footage sees Kruse reprising her interest in collage, and using the lightweight draping of the threeasFOUR collection to her advantage. “For the film, Christina developed strong conceptual and visual ideas for the piece, and I worked with her to stretch them, in terms of narrative, across time,” explains Carnes. “She usually works alone, in relation to internal experience and the female mind/body, so it excited me to work with her in this  unfamiliar territory.” That would entail writing and storyboarding, shooting underwater, sketching 3D sets and spiral projection screens to creating massive fragmented mirrors.