THERE WAS ALWAYS THE FOREST, Crystal Hartman

With the trees and high-desert as our guides, this body of work invites viewers into social and emotional landscapes, asking us to pause. Large raw canvases stretched with exposed findings on wood panels, painted with gouche and tinted with botanical dyes, depict the spaces between shadows and offer the viewer abstract doorways into conversations on environment and perspective. Clean, minimal watercolors depict the joining of humans and trees in I Am the Forest, You are the Forest, We are the Forest, presented without the barrier of glass. Sculptural reclaimed-wood blocks, painted, sanded, and waxed, offer possibilities of changing stories when we stack the characters in different ways and challenge our sense of play. Bronze slugs and moths tether us to the natural world as talismans and guardians of interconnectedness, helping us to see the light in the darkness.  

MORE BROADLY and ARTIST STATEMENT

Through an intimate practice of layering, my artwork borrows from traditional practices in drawing, book-making, and metal-smithing to create sculptural and process-based renderings of our shared relationship with the environment. I work in pencil, gouache, wax and recycled metals to create images and sculptures reimagining the natural world into a story where non-human life reigns. Inclined toward the act of gathering and maximization, I build the stories of where and who we are by piling line on top of line in sustainably havested beeswax. And then, I carve it all down, new layers obscure the details of the old, like water moving up the shoreline, stories built through botanical, entomological, and mammalian forms are cut down leaving small hints of what was there before while creating open spaces in which we can breathe. A chair left behind by a loved one sits as a shadow in an open field. Thick swarms of bees float suspended in dripping honey on a series of handmade paper scrolls. Large piles of recycled bronze snakes are sent out globally as reminders of our individual and collective wholeness, of our ability to recreate ourselves in each moment. Much of my current artwork is actualized by a call to awareness and an investigation into dichotomies: light and shadow, inside and outside, living ice and parched desert. Pushing back against what feels easy, we find that things are not always as they seem. It is in this place that I seek to call out deeper collective needs and desires and offer a beautiful story of life and possibility.