Christa
Brunks
Media:
Painting, Mixed Media
Studio Location:
10-10 44th Ave
Room/Studio#
4th Floor Studio 10
Website:
Artist Bio:
Christa Brunks is a production designer and propmaster whose visual language shapes television’s most acclaimed series, including Showtime’s Billions, Netflix’s The Night Agent, AMC’s The Walking Dead: Dead City, and Big Mistakes. Based in Long Island City—the beating heart of New York’s film and television production corridor—Brunks crafts immersive, story-driven environments in the very soundstages where the city’s ambitious work comes to life. It is here, rooted in that industry’s energy, that she brings a rare depth of narrative instinct to her fine art practice.
She holds a BFA in Fine Arts from the Fashion Institute of Technology, concentrating in installation art with minors in art history and literature. This interdisciplinary foundation—spanning visual storytelling, material culture, and critical theory— informs every dimension of her work, on set and on canvas.
Brunks fine art practice draws directly from the world-building she has honed across years of narrative television. Just as a production designer constructs environments that reveal character, history, and tension without a single line of dialogue, her artwork creates richly layered tableaux inviting viewers to step inside a story already in progress. Each piece functions as a scene unto itself—charged with implication, dense with detail, and alive with the quiet drama of objects in conversation.
Central to her approach is a deep respect for materials. Brunks treats every square inch of a composition the way she treats on-camera real estate: space that must earn its place. She finds vitality in hard objects, coaxing warmth, narrative weight, and unexpected beauty from surfaces and textures others might overlook. This materials-based philosophy bridges her dual practices, connecting the craft of a studio mechanic with the conceptual ambitions of contemporary art.
The result is work that feels both cinematic and intimate—informed by the scale and precision of production design while remaining rooted in the personal, handmade sensibility of a trained studio artist. Brunks occupies a distinctive space at the intersection of entertainment and fine art, bringing the storytelling power of the screen into the gallery and proving that the skills of world-building translate powerfully when the world being built is entirely her own.
Artist Statement:
My current work explores the power of symbolism in mass media — and the quiet, often unexamined ways that images from film and television subconsciously shape how we see the world.
As a propmaster, I understand that props are never just objects. They advance story through action, develop character, and carry symbolic weight, often all at once. Drawing from my archive of continuity stills, I reframe compositions originally created for narrative prop work into paintings, filtering these production snapshots through a new lens and asking: what are we truly conveying to an audience in each frame?
My series on firearms examines how media portrays weapons as story devices — and what that portrayal does once the work enters the cultural zeitgeist. How do the guns we so carefully select and place on screen shape the way society understands violence, power, and threat beyond the frame?
Simultaneously, I am investigating the portrayal of the body in contemporary visual culture. In making television, we weave together a series of portraits to convey relationship and dialogue, all while meticulously crafting appearance to serve a given narrative. What are we saying about bodies, gender identity, emotion, and violence in these images we produce for mass consumption?
Threading through all of this work is the question of labor. There is a daily juxtaposition on set that fascinates me: blue-collar hands building images of celebrity, trades workers constructing glamour one prop, one set piece, one carefully dressed frame at a time. That tension — between the maker and the made, the builder and the image — lives in my paintings.
My work poses the question: Am I mirroring contemporary culture back to the viewer, or through reframing and resynthesizing these compositions do they form their own unique thesis?
