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.