Clarissa Gonzalez is a North Texas based artist printmaker and educator, raised in multiple cities across South America, Europe, and Texas. By overlapping color, line, and texture, Gonzalez’ work addresses ideas of abstraction in relation to landscape, cartography, and human cosmology. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin in 2013 and received her Masters of Fine Arts in Printmaking from Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi in 2020. Prior to attending graduate school, Gonzalez was a member of Slugfest Printmaking Gallery and Workshop in Austin, Texas. Currently, she works as the Printmaking Visual Art Technician and part of the adjunct faculty at the University of North Texas in Denton, TX.

Gonzalez’ work stems from her obsession of knowing where she is at all times and the need to know the history and personal stories of a certain area or locations. She uses texture and color to emulate chaos that is ensued when exploring lands new and unknown, with a greater consideration of societal constructs and histories that humankind attaches to geography. Her large drawings, artists books, and monotypes considers the social influences of colonialism, geographic bias, authority, and nationalism amongst shifting global cultures. It is abstract cartography with a primary focus on the physical world map as an imperfect object with emphasis on how and why they were made, and the intentions of those who created them. The works utilize printmaking processes to create unconventional representations of global bodies and aesthetically claim agency over the fallible nature of land and maps; displaying the simultaneity of space and time while dissolving concepts of national identity, borders or boundaries to illuminate a need for better understanding across cultures.