June 4 - July 16, 2022In Very Important Very Unimportant, Sydney Croskery presents a suite of paintings and writings exploring ideas of perception and contradiction through the process of abstract painting.
Starting this process at zero, Croskery begins a painting by building layers of spontaneous fast actions followed by slower detailed punctuations; rinse and repeat (rinse and repeat again).
The action of painting serves as a divining rod for ideas, helping the artist whittle down thoughts about our complicated world until a specific theme aligns itself to the visuals of a piece. These themes become texts, ranging from societal to personal and from serious to absurd, accompanying the exhibition in book form. The consistent through-line of the essays highlights dual perspectives and contradictions, offering an interwoven thought-spectrum of topic and response.
Similarly, the paintings themselves contain this opposition, balancing broad stroke action painting with painstaking details, spontaneity with calculation, translucence with opacity, and the will of the materials with the hand of the artist. As an artist with a background in realism, even her arrival at abstraction is a contradiction.
In Very Important Very Unimportant, Croskery delves into abstraction to make sense of the political, emotional, overwhelming and hilarious aspects of life, with a desire to make rigorous paintings that are simultaneously timely and timeless.Artist Talk: Satuday, June 25, 11 am