Chris Farris is a conceptual artist whose paintings, sculpture, photographs, interventions, and events reflect humor, emotion, community of interdependence and a life/art interface. He grew up on a ranch in Nevada, which had a profound effect on his approach to art making and nature. His artistic practice involves exploration of thought process by means of daily writing and drawing that leads to more involved and complex work.
He moved to San Francisco to earn a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and continues to live and make work here. He also owns and operates The Space Between Gallery.
His work explores the absurd and the everyday through crude line drawings, paintings, and assemblages that blend humor, surrealism, and chance. The figures and situations he creates occupy a space between the ridiculous and the real—part dream logic, part social cartoon.
He's drawn to the raw immediacy of an unrefined line—the kind that reveals more than it hides. Each mark, smudge, or collage fragment carries its own accidental truth. Found materials and discarded objects often enter the work as both form and subject, giving voice to what’s been overlooked or forgotten.
Collage, drawing, and paint merge in spontaneous conversation, often leading to characters and scenes that feel like visual jokes told by ghosts or street poets. He uses humor as a way to disarm, to invite attention before revealing something tender, strange, or uncomfortably familiar.
Ultimately, these works are small monuments to imperfection—celebrations of the flawed, the found, and the funny ways we make sense of being human.
Chris Farris
Chris Farris is a conceptual artist whose paintings, sculpture, photographs, interventions, and events reflect humor, emotion, community of interdependence and a life/art interface. He grew up on a ranch in Nevada, which had a profound effect on his approach to art making and nature. His artistic practice involves exploration of thought process by means of daily writing and drawing that leads to more involved and complex work.
He moved to San Francisco to earn a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and continues to live and make work here. He also owns and operates The Space Between Gallery.
His work explores the absurd and the everyday through crude line drawings, paintings, and assemblages that blend humor, surrealism, and chance. The figures and situations he creates occupy a space between the ridiculous and the real—part dream logic, part social cartoon.
He's drawn to the raw immediacy of an unrefined line—the kind that reveals more than it hides. Each mark, smudge, or collage fragment carries its own accidental truth. Found materials and discarded objects often enter the work as both form and subject, giving voice to what’s been overlooked or forgotten.
Collage, drawing, and paint merge in spontaneous conversation, often leading to characters and scenes that feel like visual jokes told by ghosts or street poets. He uses humor as a way to disarm, to invite attention before revealing something tender, strange, or uncomfortably familiar.
Ultimately, these works are small monuments to imperfection—celebrations of the flawed, the found, and the funny ways we make sense of being human.