In [   the quiet roar   ] Sydney Croskery presents a suite of drawings inspired by Joshua Tree, California. The work responds to the desert's polarized forces, where nature collides with technology, societal conformity with its rejection, and where its preternatural stillness creates a silent roar.

Croskery’s practice utilizes a database system for the collection, classification and organization of banal and/or discarded items that make up the undercurrent of contemporary daily life: remnants of disposable items, photos, commercials, stolen moments from social media, etc..). In her work insignificant single items combine as a kind of hieroglyphics that reflect the over-stimulation of consumptive contemporary society. 

In Croskery's larger body of work, elements of differentiation are contrasted against each other in an effort to create coded mysterious content. For the works in [ the quiet roar ], all contrasting subjects are from Joshua Tree itself. Themes of reflexivity, and a circular nature to technology to nature was a captivating idea such as the 14 Palms oasis (an original communication and GPS device of Gold Rushers marking a water source), the Coyote Dry Creek Solar Field (which at one time was a lake and now is a field of buzzing solar panels reminiscent of a futuristic tree farm). Socially, Joshua Tree houses residents from artists and ephemera collectors to Army soldiers to Conservative Religious. The Integreton with it's magnetic sound bath originally built to call aliens, and the distant bombs tested by the army from time to time calling up futuristic ideas of space alien ........

The 7 graphite works in this series combine disparate images culled from the desert and with the architecture of the gallery in mind.  With one full wall that opens to the majesty of the desert, the works themselves look out on the quiet roar of the vast expanse.