Sydney Croskery: Everything in its Place

By Carol Cheh

Contemporary urban life comes with many conveniences, but it also comes with an overdose of “content.” Aided by the omnipresence of the mass media, information, ideas, images, objects, and people swarm relentlessly in our collective hive consciousness at all times, vying for our attention and often pulling us in multiple directions at once. Outside, congestion, traffic, and construction provide no relief from the onslaught.

As a native and current resident of Los Angeles, a city particularly well known for sprawling excess, Sydney Croskery is more than familiar with this phenomenon. For the last 12 years, the core of her work as an artist has dealt with themes of overstimulation and overconsumption. Through paintings, drawings, and now an overarching conceptual project, Croskery depicts, examines, and copes with the endless physical and mental detritus of daily urban life.

In the landscape paintings of 2004–06, we see a world in utter chaos. Oversize freeways loom over the skyline, roads wrap around trees, buildings are upended, exhaust fumes choke the sky, and oil derricks drill into infinity. The title of one painting in particular seems to say it all: Hey, I’m Over Here (2006). It’s a futile jab at asserting a human presence, as human figures are nowhere visible in this gnarled scene, where telephone wires choke everything in their path and trees, fences, and roads seem to be embroiled in an eternal battle.

In 2011, the Battles and Hybrids series takes these dystopian landscapes to the next level—a post-apocalyptic world in which humans have destroyed the planet, and nature and technology are morphing into a new hybrid species. Here, laser lights grow out of trees, stalagmites pierce toppled buildings, birds nest in appliances, and helicopters mate with glaciers. Human beings have eradicated themselves, but the remains of their civilization live on in twisted forms.

A turning point occurred later that year, when Croskery embarked on the Connect/Intersect series. Inspired by her perusal of a Skymall catalog, which she regarded as “the epitome of consumer silliness,” each drawing or painting in this series aggregates an inordinate number of household products—alarm clocks, kitchen appliances, gym equipment, chargers, etc.—and crowds them onto a single picture plane. The effect is a classic horror vacui situation, in which every inch of available space is used up; this seems to be the logical outcome of capitalist culture, which constantly goads people into consuming more, more, more.

The Connect/Interconnect series led Croskery to create her archive/database, which today functions as the central foundation of her practice. Begun as an attempt to catalog and value the pieces that make up our disposable life, the project at first consisted of 2,000 objects culled from daily life (junk mail, mascara packaging, chip bags, etc.) and cut into small abstract remnants. These original pieces were placed into a physical database—a collection of 10 boxes filled with 200 objects each—which is kept by Croskery to this day. They were also photographed and entered into a digital database, along with descriptions of their physical and lyrical properties.

The database then expanded to encompass any and all aspects of daily life, as Croskery began collecting television commercials, social media posts, and urban and scenic photographs and videos, all of which she found different ways to incorporate into her archive—whether it meant taking screen shots of social media updates, or transcribing the scripts of TV commercials. Today the whole collection exists as a searchable online database of over 3,000 unique objects with an infinite number of possible search terms and combinations.

For example, Croskery can search for blue objects + made out of cotton + that are related to the concept of outer space. The database becomes an inexhaustible conceptual tool with which to create more artwork; any number or combination of objects can be summoned, which Croskery can use to create drawings, paintings, and prints. Some may focus on a single object or group of objects, such as the blitzed out series, in which the artist executes each painting in a single sitting. Others collect a large number of images and arrange them into a tableau.

The effect of Croskery’s current practice is to organize and then neutralize the chaos and excess that she sees on a daily basis. Making contemplative drawings and paintings, isolating objects on a picture plane, drawing them in a neutral gray, flattening a parade of images on one canvas—all of this serves to harness the frenetic energy of contemporary life and tamp it down, rendering it harmless. By creating and operating this database, Croskery has finally managed to assert her presence and her agency into this out-of-control landscape, carving out a safe and productive space where she is the one who calls the shots.