C.I. Gaspar is a multi-faceted artist working in painting, alternative photographic processes, and mixed media. Working with century-old cameras, hand-mixed chemistry, gold leaf, and found materials, she creates one-of-a-kind works that exist at the intersection of photography, painting, and sculpture.

Gaspar is my maiden name. I'm reclaiming it for my art practice.

Based in Austin, Texas.

Two bodies of work, one practice. What Holds explores personal memory — identity, performance, race, class, and the distance between the surface and what lies underneath. What Remains preserves vanishing landscapes using vanishing processes — prairie wildflowers, ancient oaks, and places that no longer exist, photographed with cameras from 1914 and film from the 1940s, then gilded and transformed into relics.

Both series are about the same thing: what disappears and how we hold onto it. The medium mirrors the content — dying technologies used to memorialize dying landscapes, layers of gold and plaster over burns and wounds in the canvas.