Chris Fraser is an artist and educator living and working in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He constructs environments modeled on historical image-making technologies, from the camera obscura to the magic lantern. These apparatuses put objects in dialogue with their images, sacrificing broad distribution for an experience of image that is local and ephemeral.
Fraser has exhibited projects in North America, Europe, and Asia, at venues including the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco; Disjecta in Portland, Oregon; the D-Museum in Seoul, South Korea; and the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein, Germany. His awards include a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation and an Irvine Fellowship. He has completed residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA; Awagami Artist-in-Residence Program in Yoshinogawa, Japan; and Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA. His work is included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.
Fraser is Artist-in-Residence and Head of Photography at Cranbrook Academy of Art. He received his bachelor’s degree in history from the University of California, Davis and his MFA in Studio Art from Mills College.