Christopher Squier is an artist, writer, and co-founder of the art collective Dissolve.

His artwork explores optics and the role of light in contemporary visual culture, while his writing addresses research-based projects in a global arts context. His studio practice engages with research around luminescence, transparency, and invisibility to position vision as a historically-altered and politically-contentious experience. Squier works across media, including drawing, sculpture, site-specific installation, textile, and text-based media. His series of colored pencil drawings Disturbances expands on the ripple tank experiments of American photographer Berenice Abbott. These experiments were produced within the larger oeuvre of her photographs titled Documenting Science (1939–1958), and involved photographic exposures of light waves in water, captured with an aquarium-like photographic setup. The drawings repurpose this photographic scenario to make visible the vibrations of energy found in all matter, combining rhythm and motion on the surface of the sheet of paper. In the series Obscura and Rainbow (Redacted), he encloses graphite drawings of these same overlapping moiré patterns beneath dark, tinted glass in a reiteration of Édouard Glissant’s concept of “the right to opacity.”

Many of Squier’s recent projects engage variously with contested histories of light, whether it be the false opposition of wave and particle, a larger interest in quantum wave theory, colonial-era histories of science and superstition, the maritime empires built upon the technology of the Fresnel lens, or the imagery of Cold War-era physics textbooks. The result is a broad investigation of visual phenomena and indeterminacy within and beyond the rational, controlled space of the laboratory and the white cube.

Christopher Squier received his master’s degree from the San Francisco Art Institute and a bachelor’s in visual art from Grinnell College. He has participated in numerous artist residencies, including the Headlands Center for the Arts, Kunstnarhuset Messen, La Fragua Artist Residency, Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder, Playa Residency, and Untitled Space. In 2021, he received an Artists Corps Grant from the City of New York. His work has been exhibited at BABEL Visningsrom for Kunst, California College of the Arts, the De Young Museum, the Expatriate Archive Centre, the Hubbell Street Galleries, and the ZIBA Prague Glass Experience Museum, among others. For the recurring sculpture festival Play/Ground, Squier presented a monumental tapestry in collaboration with the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art, Re:Source Art, and Explore & More Children’s Museum.

Squier exhibits regularly with Amos Enos Gallery, an alternative, nonprofit platform for professional artists and one of New York City’s longest operating artist-run gallery spaces. He is a founding member of the arts writing collective Dissolve and also writes criticism for his newsletter The Placebo Post.

He is based in New York City.