Adam Crosson, the new assistant professor of sculpture at Tulane, displayed his artwork including light sculptures at CAG.
Zachary Araki/The Lion’s Roar
Adam Crosson experimented with space and light in the exhibition “Adam Crosson: The Four-Pointed Triangle” at the Contemporary Art Gallery.
Crosson graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016 with a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture and extended media. He accepted an assistant professor of sculpture position at Tulane University.
“In the span of a year, I went from catching rides in the back of pickups along the Kuhio Highway to pulling all-nighters leading up to critique deadlines,” said Crosson. “Those two periods of time were certainly influential, and the qualities of each could be considered bookends to my practice, one improvisational and the other highly structured at times to a fault. I continue to work toward a reckoning of these seeming polarities.”
Newkirk says the large sculpture coming off one of the walls is his favorite piece.
“All of them are placed in relationship to the gallery, the walls of the gallery and the space in the gallery, but this one, the way it cantilevers out into the space is very dynamic,” said CAG Director Dale Newkirk. “When you walk by the gallery at night, it changes the look of the gallery and kind of invites you to want to investigate it more. I also think it’s really changed the space how the artist changed the lights in the gallery to these pink lights and turned the other gallery lights off, which creates an island inside of the gallery where these smaller pieces are.”
Crosson included photographs shot in Louisiana beside his light sculptures.
“By switching them over to shooting the negative rather than the positive image, he’s experimenting with light more, which is kind of like what he’s doing with the sculptures,” said Newkirk.
The exhibition title alludes to geographic points on a map travelled over time.
“The uttterance speaks of trajectories known and unknown, of pit stops along the way, of occupation, change, movement and of wholeness and completion and the problematics arising out of the language of boundary, line, perimeter and the binary of interior, exterior,” said Crosson. “As much as the tracings of the four-pointed triangle appear to consist solely of lines, the lines themselves, the tracings are conduits containing time, textures and extents all to themselves. Four-Pointed Triangle speaks of improbabilities, of missing and imperceptible data, of questions of faith and will and in what and of whom.”
The closing reception is on Aug. 17 at noon. Incoming students and the public can attend free of charge.
“I think that the students will enjoy how this show really radically changes with the gallery,” said Newkirk. “If they’re familiar with space and how the artist is using the space and light, I think it will be different than what they’re used to and what they normally think of as art. If they come into it thinking about paintings or traditional statues and sculptures, that’s not what they’re going to see.”
