New Paintings

During a trip in 2019 to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, Crown was drawn to a sculpture of Buddha effaced and melted by the atomic bomb during World War II Her investigation of the Buddha sculpture, revealed a form that echoed the shape of the mushroom cloud. The image is heart-wrenching and represents the shadowy echo of the bomb. It embodied the moment as an indexical witness to the power of the destruction. And yet, it is also phoenix-like, representing hope and understanding of how we can do better. In this most recent series, Crown iterates on the sculpture’s form time and again, transforming the 3d sculpture into a 2d abstracted representation, layering varying mediums to build up the surface. The original icon and its iterative forms, reminding us all we can begin again, and renew from the destruction.

Aspen Maps is an ongoing series by Crown based on trail maps in Aspen that are abstracted, layered, and rotated to reveal new forms and patterns. Digital and analog drawing and painting techniques reveal what is present in a novel way. As we orient ourselves to space, our perceptions are easily distorted by point of view, time, and memory. Crown’s newest Aspen Maps push their reconfigurations even further. To Be Titled (Yellow Abstraction) includes formal elements that are painted in three dimensions yet remain perplexingly flat. In To be Titled (Black and White) the bright colors of the series are distilled down to black and white, further disorienting the source image with a disarmingly crisp graphic quality. They serve as a reminder that we must always question the information presented to us and ask what has been left out of the story.