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Artworks

Sean Crossley, Cereal Space , 2022

Sean Crossley

Cereal Space , 2022
Oil on linen
10 panels, 210 x 21 cm each
82 5/8 x 8 1/4 in each
Courtesy of the artist & Harlan Levey Projects
In his 1987 essay 'The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race', the anthropologist Jared Diamond posits that it was not humans that domesticated nature, but the other...
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In his 1987 essay "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race", the anthropologist Jared Diamond posits that it was not humans that domesticated nature, but the other way around, as he illustrates how a specific mutation of wheat plants proposed an alternate mode of organizing space, time and labor. This ancestral encounter with a mutated wheat grain produced a fundamental paradigm shift to mercantilism, speculation, domestication and eventually adornment of private space. Beginning with an electro-microscopic image of a wheat grain, "Cereal Space" resembles an image of vast natural space that is unreasonably organized as it spreads across ten panels abstracting itself into a glitched topographical model or bacterial expanse. Separated, the panels resemble formats of 19th century decorative painting tailor-made for spaces between doors and wall corners in apartments. When lined up side by side, their totality produces an image resembling a landscape, or a slice in the earth’s crust. This is a sedimentary painting of terrestrial materials; oils from plant seeds, ground earth and metal pigments, layered upon a ground of condensed petrochemical gesso literally distilled from thousands of years of compressed organic matter. The brushstrokes, textures, layers and corrections are perhaps a diagram of the broader temporal scale of how the materials themselves came to be. This genealogical dimension of the materials renders an image of a reality without illusion, the result of a somewhat beautiful complicity between entropy and commerce.
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