Dream Fruit
2020
Acrylic on canvas, sewn

Sarah Crowner’s (b. 1974, Philadelphia) diverse practice ranges from paintings and ceramics to sculpture and theatre curtains. Her bold and colorful paintings and tile works incorporate forms found in architecture, nature and in the history of 20th-century art and design. Her stitched paintings are created by using an industrial sewing machine to sew painted and raw irregular panels of canvas together, simultaneously revealing the painting’s composition and construction. Sections are painted in saturated primary colors to imply a form, a presence, a possibility. The stitched seams remain visible, like plant veins or arteries, reflecting her interest in systems and patterns, production and reproduction, in culture and nature.

At times the seams, and forms they suggest, recall hard-edged paintings of the 1960s, and in others, curved lines conjure biomorphic abstraction. She treats the past, the natural world and popular culture as a medium; zooming in, rotating, reversing, cropping, repeating, mirroring, shrinking and enlarging the familiar to engage the viewer, revealing connections between micro and macro, individual and context.