Sarah Crowner: Patterns (2018)
Paperback, 96 pages, 8 x 10 inches, 81 color and 13 B&W images
Edition of 1000
Sarah Crowner’s Patterns is the second artist book in a series that she has been developing around the formal aspects of her painting practice.
In Patterns, Crowner assembles and layers a multitude of patterns that have inspired her recent work. This material is comprised of repetitive visual systems found in nature, architecture, fashion, sculpture, and painting that she has culled from a variety of source media: photographs, magazine pages, drawings, and advertisements, among others. The artist has collaged this material into a moving narrative that establishes a conversation with images of her own work and ephemera, which are interspersed throughout the book.
Patterns provides rare insight into the artist’s process, situating the reader inside the formal systems that populate our day-to-day lives. While the artist’s exhibitions and paintings demonstrate a hard edge, this publication skirts those edges with corporeality, either through the artist’s sketchbook marks, textured drawings, and torn pages, or through the images’ many subjects living their lives: trying on shoes, dancing, commuting, recreating, or working. While painting has always been concerned with the act of viewing (something Crowner does astutely), it is here that we can see the artist and her subjects living amongst and generating the visual patterns that have come to define her work.
