2007 exhibition
Love
Alva Gallery, New London at RJ Julia

2007 exhibition statement
NOT Nature Morte
Willoughby's Coffee Bar, 30"x36" Flasche on Arches cotton, 2002 - 2007

. . . . . The engagement of art works in art theoretical strategies makes work contemporary in its time, or not.
. . . . . Here, Dada is an abandoned espresso and lettuce. The Sublime is the shock of a "crooked painting". Appropriation is the idea of proving verticality by using drips. Feminine Practice is the idea of Jackson Pollack drips by a female. Too, it's about taking up big space, noisily, like guys do. My paintings are rectangles and require less square inches of work for the amount of real estate they inhabit. Instead of more work and lower pay, they require Less Work for More Pay.
. . . . . Art strategies are employed for what purpose? 1 to catch you off guard. 2 to send you into a confused vertigo. 3 + 4 to manipulate you to question thestatus quo. Artists through history have posed questions and agitated for a different reference starting point.
. . . . . We’re reeling. Will someone else will fix global warming and raise our stock portfolio value? In the EU, they ride bikes and take public transport. We buy more albeit smaller cars and driving around the same amount.
. . . . . Liberace playing shortened versions of the classical repetoire by leaving out the boring parts. Miami, Madison, Nice, Berlin, NYC, London - the job of contemporary art and its capitals is to ask the questions. Time is fleeting.
© Lady McCrady 2007

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2006 exhibition statement
Three Red Holiday Balls !
Willoughby's Coffee Bar. three 5' drawings 50"x30". Cadmium on Arches cotton

. . . . . I made these drawings when I had a bouncing, feisty, happy baby who wanted to cling to me all the time. I wanted to protect and provide a safe
haven for him. These are about the icon of Mother and Child. They are portraits of son and mother. The form I make them in is a sort of game or
amusement. The Art History topics I work in are The Sublime (huge scary forces we can’t quite wrap ourselves around, like weather and love), and
Phenomenology (I prefer pFun o’ men ology) the essence of things (or the oddness of the timing of curious incidents). So the outer form is trying to
balance - could topple - could roll. The two sections (or 4) are unequal and connected and/or they vie for dominance and/or they collaborate. The titles
are left to right - Red Haven Icon 76 (goodnight moon); Red Vigor Icon 77; Red Protector Icon 78. They’re made on French Arches paper with cadmium
pigment, blending stomps, conté and vacuum cleaner erasures. The dust is lethal.
. . . . . When I look at them now, they have a dangerous velocity. And what about red? Love, passion, red on right channel marker, English “bloody hell”. If
red is the drone in the background, it’s a pretty intense place. But red is also those cute traffic danger cones. Critics blamed Liberace for the rhinestone
studded capes and the burning candelabras on the giant grand piano. But what really got them was his flashy, shortened renditions of classical music.
His answer was “I just left out the boring parts”.

Red Haven Icon was reproduced in The New York Times in 1991 from an exhibition at Connecticut College, New London.
L I F E . C O M E S . A T . Y O U . F A S T . L a d y M a c C r a d y .
© Lady McCrady 2007

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2006 . Art intention, process, escape, transformation, objective appraisal.
. . . . . My motivation for working, the art intention, is to allow an escape of impulses I couldn't and wouldn't normally access. It can actually be very scary.
The escape of impulses is part of the art process, and it causes a state of mind labeled with a scientific term - Flow.
. . . . . To experience something New causes transformation in the mind.
. . . . . The human raw elements of art making are movement and ritual. The material raw elements are clay, steel, atmospheric elements acting on raw metal, oil combined with pigment, a brush of animal hairs, charred wood on buffered aluminum, steam+LEDs.

: The Process of art making and the Art Object itself are their own language.

. . . . . While you are in the experience of making the object, you can't be objective.
. . . . . And the art intention, what it's trying to reveal, appears much later after you've finshed it and gotten out away from it, when you can see it from an
objective frame of mind.