Fulcrum

Description:

Phillip McCrum’s solo exhibition Fulcrum mixed landscape painting, portraiture, sculptures, historical diagrams, and critical writing to examine and decentralize the essential “codes” of representation and the relationship between artist and viewer. 

Two large freestanding rectangular sculptures, painted in black-and-white geometric patterns, were positioned at opposite ends of the gallery. McCrum extended the same motif across a series of paintings. While the paintings all contained elements of the landscape and portrait tradition (perspective, figure, ground, and scale), the pattern reduced them to a system of marks in an attempt to strip away anything extra-systemic in order to arrive at a morphology of painting.

The show also included a critical text by McCrum published under his pseudonym C. Rossi. Titled “The Essay,” the text was  broken into three segments: Art, Analysis, and Apology, and parodied the structure and voice of conservative art criticism.