Dewey Crumpler “Post Atlantic”

Andrew Kreps Gallery

[Image: Dewey Crumpler "Post Atlantic" (2023)]

This event has ended.

Andrew Kreps Gallery presents Post Atlantic, the gallery’s first exhibition with the Oakland-based artist Dewey Crumpler (b. 1949, Magnolia, AK).

In his work, Crumpler employs a lexicon of motifs through which he examines how the systems of our globalized world both carry and alter meaning, as well as the felt traces of racial violence that are imbued within everyday life. An encounter with a documentary photograph of an item described as an African slave collar in the 1990s sparked an ongoing, decades long engagement with the object, often occurring in repeated and abstracted forms in dense compositions. First interested was the collar’s ovoid shape, which immediately suggested the absence of a body, or wearer, Crumpler later discovered the object’s original function as a sacred object employed in ritual ceremonies, which was only recast when brought to the New World. The collar would then become a bridge to investigate how the extraction of objects and concepts from their original context, and their subsequent appropriation and colonization, fundamentally alters their resonance and purpose - an inquiry that permeates the entirety of Crumpler’s practice.
Simultaneously, the hulking container ships that dominate Oakland’s port would emerge as a parallel project, as the stacked shipping containers both carry and conceal the apparatuses of commerce, often utilizing the same Transatlantic routes that emerged in the 15th century. These works, while representational in approach, similarly explore how these systems can be understood through abstraction, whether it be the vivid alternating colors of the containers, or the formal ridges of their corrugated exteriors which engage in a play of light and shadow. Often depicted as being in a state of peril, either crashed or burst open, they display the spoils of a commodity-based culture. These include bananas, meats, clothing, all items that while at first appear banal and familiar, often carry with them a history of exploitation that is obscured by the time they arrive at their destination. In new works, Crumpler has introduced an anthropomorphized, empty hoodie, which has been the subject of its own body of work since the 1990s, further investigating how the memory of an object merges with its present, to shape a new experience of time and reality.