Paula Crown's New Level Of Ambiguity In Immersive Installation At Goss-Michael Foundation

On April 7, 2016 artist Paula Crown will debut Bearings Down, an aesthetically striking and visually charged immersive installation at The Goss-Michael Foundation in Dallas. The work is an extension of the artist’s prolific studio practice and a harmonic blend of sound, performance and mark-making. Bearings Down distills a landscape drawing that is magnified, rotated in space and crafted into a 3-dimensional image etched on glass. This rigid plane serves as the top of the rectangular sculpture that is a 3’x 4’ x 3” box. The mirrored interior base projects varied optical perspectives and infinite reflections of a ficticious space. The etched glass surface is subsequently shattered by ball bearings tossed by the artist. Consistent with indexical mark-making, the gestures themselves become invisible lines reminiscent of the kinesthetic action Jackson Pollock realized in his drip paintings.

The hurtled bearings ignite a pattern of linear fractures of glass. The surface breaks into organic forms, as some of the glass is nearly atomized upon impact. Then the bearings roll, careen and come to rest in the bottom of the box. The spherical forms and the gravitational forces that propel them reflect the underlying cycles of nature and being. In the installation space, fluid calligraphic computer graphics and video passages presented on three 10’ x 5’7” screens recall this event bringing the past and present in rotation. The experience of the physical piece is determined by the positioning of the viewer, although its depth and reflection make it difficult to determine scale, location and time. The relationship between object and video, along with the sound recordings, create arresting moments of musicality, color and material. Nature provides moments of reflective serendipity. Crown presents a new level of ambiguity, challenging notions of where rigid and painterly forms meet. This ephemeral space “in between” was referred to by Duchamp as the infra thin. As a cohesive experience, Bearings Down provides glimpses of the macro and micro, the internal and external, and the physical and emotional dimensions that we all inhabit and navigate as humans. The installation plays with convention - transforming modes of drawing and engaging multiple senses. Paula Crown received an MFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an A.B in management from Duke University. Her work is focused on engaging technology and traditional studio partical along with investigating the relationships between time, space, topography and humanity.

She serves on President Obama’s Committee for the Arts and the Humanities, is a board member of the Museum of Modern Art, Duke University, Clean Energy Trust, Lurie Children’s Hospital and the Aspen Institute Committee for the Arts.