Artist Profile

Rainey Straus Profile Photo

Rainey Straus

San Rafael, CA

My work responds to the unfolding absences of the climate catastrophe. It reaches for different ways of being and knowing — a practice that opens to the more-than-human world, as anthropologist Tim Ingold describes, a correspondence that keeps the world alive and emergent. My work begins during walks in Northern California. I make cyanotypes and paintings rooted in direct experiences of walking the land. I am curious about how we perceive and build relationships with specific places.

After many years of working as a tech designer, Rainey has returned to art practice. Earlier work explored the impact of technology on the body/mind and the world of computer games as art. Her current inquiry turns away from human exceptionalism to collaborate with the more-than-human world. Rainey’s work has been shown at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Design Exchange Museum in Toronto, Canada. She has been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center as an Artist’s grant recipient. Select publications include Dark Mountain Journal, Aeonian Magazine Online, Sculpture Magazine, Rhizome Online, Videogames and Art, edited by Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose Mercury News. Rainey holds a BFA in Painting from SUNY Purchase and an MFA in Sculpture from the California College of the Arts.

My Artwork