Robin Crookall
My work is a blend of sculpture and photography. The subjects of my images are assembled sets of exteriors and interiors. With a collage of elements, my work creates scenes consisting of part fact and part aspect. I construct architectural models which I photograph, and print. For these models, I primarily use cardboard, tape, and hot glue; unsophisticated materials that retain a certain cogency and drabness when captured in a photo. Focusing on subjects like the corner of a room or the facade of a house, the images showcase environments that are at once familiar and safe, underwhelming and routine, creating something broadly accessible. What the audience sets out to experience in the photograph changes in perspective from visualizing the subject as an actual photographed place as opposed to seeing what is really its scale-model counterpart. The experience results in the viewer questioning the preexisting notions of reality, memory, and place. Complex abstractions result in the intersection and overlap of those perceptions. The photograph is the ideal pedestal for these concepts, for its singular capacity for both depiction and deception. If you can’t trust your own eyes, then you can’t trust your own definition of place. And where are you supposed to exist at the plane of the image if all that grounds you, is slowly dissolving away?
The pursuit of the uncanny drives to create a particular kind of illusion. Not the big flashy kind, where an elephant disappears right before your eyes, but the subtlety of the card-counter, the sleight of hand, and unnoticeable graceful dance of the pickpocket. I am not a wizard, there is no real magic here. The best tricks are the ones we don’t even see.
Robin Crookall is a 2021 finalist in The Print Centers, 95th Annual International Competition. In April 2021 she had a solo exhibition at Real Art Ways in Hartford CT. Fall 2020 she completed a residency and solo show at Penumbra Foundation in New York City. Crookall is a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in photography from The New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2016, Crookall received her MFA from New York University. In 2007 Crookall completed her BFA at the University of Washington. Crookall has recently been featured in Musée Magazine, and Vast Magazine.
