06 Jan 2020

Thom Cooney Crawford

Nurture Nature Center

Reviewed by Elizabeth Johnson

Thom Cooney Crawford fills the cavernous Nurture Nature Center Theater Gallery, nailing the coordinates of a groundless, mobile perspective. Micro-crystalline wax sculptures and acrylic and oil paintings culled from forty years' work depict universes, stars, planets, and black holes studding the voids. Burial-shrouded, child-sized, sightless, Janus-faced Orpheus Figures orbit Angel Tree Shapeshifter, suggesting that disturbing but serene intergalactic excursions occur during meditation, sleep, or death.

With Ancient Twists equates the curvature of a white eyeball with the surface of a mirrored lens. A black pupil inside the eye encloses a distant, white-yellow-red-green planet. This planet reflects its color back to us, seeming to replace the original eye with a conjured one.

Rendering paradox through contrasting circles and ellipses, Cooney Crawford elicits the horror and beauty of a transformed, warped, skewed existence at great conceptual distance from Earth.