Denton Crawford’s work finds a playground in the tension
between the impossibility of utopia and our everlasting striving toward it. His
current solo show, “You’re Not Here,” which closes tonight at Joy Gallery (498
West Main Street), includes older mixed media paintings and drawings, as well
as new installations. The space has been transformed into a hypnotic enticement
of vibrating pastels, subdued neons, a crush of lush
foliage, and specters of a sacred maternal presence.
Crawford’s ink and gouache drawings span the last two or
three years, and include elements fed by album covers, films, and books.
Silhouettes of the Virgin, drawn from a famous Renaissance painting, here stand
in for any shrouded mystical figure: Mother Mary or Death alike. Hands steepled in prayer, the empty figures are furnished with
roots, vines, foliage, and blossoms.
“I create personalized accounts of experience that explore
the boundaries between logic and belief,” Crawford says in the provided
statement. “I like to think about how both familiar and unacquainted
objects and imagery can resonate with the viewer in ways that cannot be fully
understood or codified, crafting a disembodied sensation.”
Crawford’s pop-mysticism embodies the meeting place of
influences as varied as resonant fiction or philosophy, a strict military and
religious upbringing, or a ramble through nature. “The work is fed by
conflicting ideologies, presenting unnatural events or ephemera that seem at
once enticing and suspicious,” he says. “The hope is to set the stage
for moments of experience informed by the viewers’ own relationship to the
work.”
Being a lover of a good sylvan sanctuary, “Our Church”
in particular activates my swoon impulse. A tunnel of trees that are part
apparition and part tangly bramble is framed by a
large triangle, and at the end, a downward pointing triangle hints at a sheer
drop. Crawford says the imagery is inspired by Patrick’s Point in Northern
California (close to where he used to live), by Pascal’s triangle, and the
varied symbolism of triangles in general. The work is about “not really holding
a difference between a walk in the woods and some arcane philosophical idea,”
he says.
Another large painting, “Narcissus,” is in part influenced by
having read Leon Battista Alberti’s “On Painting,”
and in particular, his quote “what is painting but embracing the surface of the
pool?” “Camus talks about the inherent evil within nature, and relates it
to beauty as well,” Crawford says. An acid-colored cloudy sky roils over
calm water, and a central circle holds twin gnashing maws, a savage presence
peeking through a sort of portal.
Crawford made “Daydream” after reading “Lord
of the Flies” for the first time. “It blew my mind,” he says.
“It was like, everything in this book, I’ve been making work about since
grad school. It’s really this instinct versus logic kind of thing, and I think
about that a lot in my work.”
The painting is another soothing scene with hints of
mysticism, and he says he eventually intends for there to be a juxtaposing
sculpture in front of it, based on the part of the book when Simon is on the
verge of losing his mind, and the pig’s head starts talking to him.
The newer work in the rear room is titled “My
Disembodied Sermon,” based on the theme of disembodiment which kept
rearing its head in Crawford’s work. “I think about art as preaching in a way,
so I want to create that sort of experience for people when they come into a
space,” he says. “Like they’re here to worship in a way.”
The space contains a few small abstract paintings as well as
installations that feel like sacred reliquaries. One wall is taken up by an
altar-like set up, with a fabricated skull on a neon box with a pyramid inside.
All of this is set on a pedestal, on a triangle of carpet, mirrored by a
triangle painted on the wall.
Nearby, a glow-in-the-dark, plastic Virgin Mary trinket
stands at the edge of a rough-formed foam cliff projected from a crucifix that
is anchored to the wall. She’s covered in more plastic, which cured in streams
and drips, with an effect that looks a bit…perverse. But how the object has
been altered is arguably no more offensive than the presence of this object to
begin with. “How more sacrilegious can you be?” Crawford says. “It’s
like this token of spirituality.”
Like many of his electric pastel paintings, the space is
overrun with the subdued neons, influenced by the
time he spent living in Florida. It reads “almost like candy,” he
says. “There’s an element of superficiality to it that I really enjoy,
operating from a place of sincerity that’s pastiched,
in a way.”
A closing reception for Crawford’s show at Joy Gallery will
be held Friday, March 20, 6-9 p.m.
Crawford currently lives in Rochester, New York, where he
teaches drawing and new media classes at Rochester Institute of Technology.
Learn more at dentoncrawford.com.
This article appears in Mar 18-24, 2015.
