CRAWFORD, Jim

ca. 1972

serigraph on cardboard, 3/50

sheet: 16.375 x 19 in; image: 10.125 x 13.5 in

What strikes me first about this series is its materiality. Jim Crawford, an early conceptualist, photographed industrial cast-offs that become icons of the urban landscape in the Cass Corridor of Detroit (mid 60s-70s) where he lived and worked. Crawford was drawn to overlooked or discarded productsbricks, pipes and concrete rubble, found in haphazard arrangementswhich he reconsidered and recontextualized into something else: art. I imagine him stalking the vacant lots, looking for materials; piled, stacked, heaped and tossed. His compositions are elegant, centered and brutally honest. He asks us to re-configure our ways of looking, guiding us with metaphoric titles transforming one thing whimsically into another. The work is intentionally low; incorporating the same kind of accessible, non-archival cardboard you might have found discarded in one of the piles. This doubling back connects the final product with the subject. Everything seems on the verge of transition, at the moment of eminent un-doing. Crawfords Piled series concludes permanence is an illusion and punctuates it with the inevitable demise of the pieces themselves. Penelope Gottlieb MFA 2004, Artist

ca. 1972

CRAWFORD, Jim

United States, b. 1951

Gift of Gary H. Brown in memory of John Bommer

1990.7.5