Framed work s , f r e e s t a n d i n g s c u l p t u r e s
a n d s i t e – s p e c i f i c i n s t a l l a t i o n s
Susan Crowell / Larry Cressman

Material. What’s become of it? We don’t write, we email. We don’t print film, we ‘Photoshop’. We don’t spin records, we shuffle mp3s. We don’t dust off the Britannica, we ‘Google’. Immaterial—the word increasingly describes the form and content of daily life (i.e. Your morning CNN celebrity-scandal-crisis and no internet for two blocks!). Art, while often reflecting the Zeitgeist, can also significantly refute it. Such is the art of Susan Crowell and Larry Cressman. The work of both artists directly challenges the status quo’s M.O., where perception of our material world is increasingly mediated by zero-one-zero information. For them it is all material, and one may find information stored and delivered not on PDAs, but through sticks and mud.

Susan Crowell

Crowell (mud), once described building with clay in terms of gynecology and obstetrics, a mark of the impish humor she employs to balance intense focus. To the degree with which she senses the physiology and indeed the atomic structure of her material, she is a doctor of clay. She is in conversation with it, and it’s a dialogue of mutual benefit. As she says, she is enabling the material to assume the form it wants to have. Healing it, perhaps. By persuasion rather than demand, she often creates sumptuous, voluminous shapes. Succulent curves bend light subtly and smoothly like figures in a Botero painting. But rather than pink and rotund ladies, the subject may be a svelte “Phantasmagoria”. Some pieces inform through manipulation of light, space, and time such as “Tumble”, a composition of energetic forces in freeze-frame. Others, such as “Blibula” and “Nociceptor,” speak of sensations as much psychological as physical. In Crowell’s case, immersion and concentration are prerequisite for creative action. (No iPhones here, please). Delivery of those forms that survive involves the steady, sustained focus often lacking in our frenetic existence. Indeed, she is the master of time, both in her space and that which her work inhabits— a practitioner of ‘Slow Art’.

Cressman (sticks…lots of sticks) is indefatigably a draftsman, and an extra-dimensional draftsman at that. His unrelenting pursuit, often of transient form, is

Larry-Cressman

ruled by “the mark”. And many marks he has, indeed. His studio contains thousands of twigs that are not only meticulously sorted by size and individually painted but, as if on butterfly wings, are often suspended equidistant from the ground plane. His intense craft is as masterful as it is understated. In works such as “The Nature of Drawing V” and “Dogbane (Sketch #1) one struggles to determine whether Larry’s work involves an automatic scattering of marks a la Cy Twombly, or an intense, seemingly algorithmic, compositional calculation. Through time and space, with deft acts of compositional and literal balance, Cressman’s work responds to the viewer; it is interactive. Content is ‘downloaded’ as one moves around pieces oscillating from linear to planar and back again. Upending conventional perceptions of architectural space, his site-specific installations often raise the question, “do we inhabit space or does it contain us?” Fittingly, Cressman is a collector of many things: odd birdcages, old post cards, wire objects, eccentric artifacts. But then again a drawing, as we know it, is simply a choice collection of marks.

Today, in a world where the encoding of information is ever accelerating, Cressman and Crowell honor the artistic tradition of making the unseen manifest. Tangible— enduring in real space and real time—their works imprint psychologically on our selves with a power and permanency binary code has yet to attain. Crowell and Cressman achieve what theorist Walter Benjamin described as the ability of art, in the age of mechanical reproduction, to command one’s time, to “consume the viewer” rather than the inverse. The two manage precisely this with decidedly low-tech materials, a reversal (in that Benjamin’s paradigm shift was made possible through ‘high’ technology) accomplished only through mastery. As artists and award-winning teachers, what manifestations their students and, indeed, we all will witness from them and their work promises to be far from immaterial.