Christopher Fitzgerald often makes videos, but he’s not a filmmaker. Complex and engaging, his practice also includes small watercolor works and large oil paintings. While the premise for his projects might seem utopian, Fitzgerald’s typical subjects of late are anything but: watery, hazy images of the scarred faces of hospital patients constantly reoccur in his paintings. One such work is the first thing one sees when entering Fitzgerald’s studio, a space that looks more like an impromptu film set than a painter’s work area.

An operating table-like structure lies in the center of the room and scattered about are complex assemblages of tubes still stained from pumping fake blood. Recently, Fitzgerald has focused on videos in addition to painting, and the operating table is his latest prop. When describing the set, Fitzgerald seems particularly energized by the idea that all of this has been cobbled together from scraps —that it will only gain believability when a camera is trained on it.

What’s striking is how much these special effects detritus, all translucent plastic and traces of fluid, resembles the imagery in the paintings. What immediately jumps out (both in the videos and paintings) is his color palette: the muted pastel flesh tones of his subject’s faces predominate, punctuated with the occasional burst of, say, a teal oxygen tube or a crimson splotch of blood. His paintings seem like stains on a surgeon’s scrubs, and the videos employ a similar bleached out aesthetic through the use of intensely controlled studio sets combined with lenses chosen for their short depth of field. Everything feels watery, as if the images seen in the videos were just another variant of the drippy stains on his canvases.

Fitzgerald’s images feel like an out of body experience, and it’s no surprise that his overarching narratives are fixated on the idea of trauma and life prolonging technologies. His first short entitled Vapor, tells the story of dismal future without death, conflating the aesthetics of a David Lynch film with the ambience of THX 1138. In his video Graft, a surgeon attempts to graft a patient’s heart to his brain. Narratives aside, what drives Fitzgerald to video in the first place? He says his fascination with the cinematic experience began at an early age, when he had the opportunity to visit film sets and sound stages. “Every few years my family would visit our cousins in Burbank, California. My uncle was the head of the fire department contracting with Warner Brothers and Universal Studios. I was able to visit sets for movies and television shows created during the 80s. I’ve always been fascinated with behind-the-scenes construction.”

While Fitzgerald involves the language of cinema in his work, he sees his videos as an extension of a larger whole rather than a logical end product. “I’ve never desired to enter the commercial movie industry, but rather incorporate those processes into my studio practice.” Beyond the narratives he constructs, perhaps what is most engaging about Fitzgerald’s body of work is the slippage between mediums, the way a fragment of one of the videos might trickle its way into a painting, or vice-versa. His studio is a snowball of fake blood, medical supplies, and prosthetics growing larger and larger, with the bleary, comatose faces of his subjects at its core. One gets the sense that, like the oxygen tubes and IV drips sustaining the life of his painterly subjects, the real drive for Fitzgerald may not be his narratives, but the epic apparatus that keeps it all on life support.