Robin Crookall Fine Print

Robin Crookall’s work is a blend of sculpture and photography. The subjects of her images are assembled sets of exteriors and interiors, with an accumulation of objects culled from her immediate surroundings, and imagination. She is specifically drawn to the mid-century modern archetype, for its “all-American,” familiar atmosphere. With a collage of elements, her work creates scenes consisting of part fact and part aspect. Crookall’s images are constructed architectural models that she builds, photographs, and enlarges. These unpretentious components aid the viewer in feeling the uncanniness in the picture. 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 preexisting notions of reality, memory, and place. Complex abstractions result in the intersection and overlap of perceptions. The photograph is the ideal pedestal for these concepts, due to 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 on the plane of the image, if all that grounds you is slowly dissolving away?

Crookall (b. 1985) was a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in photography in 2019 and a finalist in the The Print Center’s 95th Annual International Competition in 2021. Solo exhibitions include Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT and Penumbra Foundation, New York. Participation in group exhibitions includes Art Basel, Miami; Candela Gallery,Richmond, VA; Field Projects, New York; Friesen Gallery, Seattle; Gallery 4Culture, Seattle; and Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA. Her work has appeared in Arts in Square, IndieFoto, Musée Magazine, Real Art Ways Zine, The Seattle Times, and Vast Magazine. Crookall received her BFA in ceramics from the University of Washington, Seattle, studied ceramics as a post-baccalaureate at the University of Montana, Missoula, and received an MFA from New York University. She was born in Utah and lives in Brooklyn.

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