NYAB Event - Carol Crawford “TRANSFIGURATIONS”

Carol Crawford “TRANSFIGURATIONS”

Atlantic Gallery

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Atlantic Gallery presents “TRANSFIGURATIONS”, an exhibition of life-sized figurative drawings by CAROL CRAWFORD.

Proud women, dancers, angels and monsters…each drawn figure is a statement of Ms. Crawford’s passionate involvement with the human body as a conveyor of mood, allegory, and ideas.

Most of the figures are solitary, occupying a space without boundaries or background, crouching or standing over six feet tall. They are created using charcoal, pastel, and monoprint collage. Many are encased in layered acrylic shapes that float on the walls, frameless, casting their own shadows, commanding the space in which they are presented. The dancers are partially free-standing, their torsos stationary on the wall, their legs free-standing. As the viewer moves past, the dancers appear to subtly shift position.

“Fallen Angels”is a composite work composed of four male figures, performing beneath a broken sky: One angel with a grinning death’s head directs two winged figures, who leap blindly toward “heaven” at his command, while a fourth figure, created out of monoprint collage and mirror, remains earthbound, weeping and gazing upward at the goal he cannot reach, heaven, a puzzle that does not quite come together. Ms Crawford defines its meaning as “an allegory of corporate man, and a reference to the biblical myth of Lucifer, once the most beautful angel, cast out of heaven for his arrogance. It is a metaphor of our own follies and earthly strivings”.
As Carol Crawford explains, “Each figure has a life of its own. They are not traditional figure studies, although in some cases I used a model; to me, they are invented people whose body language expresses their inner life, or purpose. The drawn lines change character to express my feeling toward each subject.”

Carol Crawford’s work as an artist draws upon her broad background in documentary photography, filmmaking, printmaking, art history and theater set design. It is enriched by her work as an interior and environmental designer. Crawford has taught life drawing, art history, lithography and design at Stanford University and Foothill College in California, Queens College and Queensbrough Community College, CUNY. Since 1998 she has been a faculty member of the Interior Design Department at Pratt Institute, where she received her M.S.I.D. in 1995, and where she has taught both graduate and undergraduate courses, emphasizing sustainable design.
Her creative work and public art projects have been recognized by numerous grants and awards; and have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums in the U.S., Canada, Japan and France. She has been a member of Atlantic Gallery since 2008, and designed its new premises, in 2012, in the Arts Landmark Building, 548 West 28th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan.
She is also President of LIC-A / Long Island City Artists, Inc., a non-profit arts advocacy organization.