Sarah Crowner
'Platform as Platform'
Sarah Crowner’s Platform as Platform is an impressive artwork and a generous invitation. For this new exhibition, the artist has created her largest installation to date, a site-specific structure that stretches a span of nearly 230 feet. Fabricated from custom-made terracotta tiles created in Guadalajara, Mexico, the floor-based work echoes the accumulative repetition of the building’s historic brick masonry, while the tiles’ colorful, glossy glaze and wavy design form a vast, dynamic ground that seems to extend into the horizon.
Crowner welcomes viewers to stand on, walk across, or even dance around the light-refracting composition, encouraging an experience that shifts our relationship to painting. Crowner’s work also functions as a foundation for a group of stretched drop cloths sourced from the SCAD fibers department’s screen-printing lab, displaying the accumulated layers from years of use by students and faculty. These collaborative canvases transform a potentially overlooked surface into something laden with meaning and aesthetic merit, evoking the reframed viewpoint that her installation offers. An inclusive, expansive gesture, Platform as Platform enjoins us to reconsider how we see the world.
Sarah Crowner’s Platform as Platform is an impressive artwork and a generous invitation. For this new exhibition, the artist has created her largest installation to date, a site-specific structure that stretches a span of nearly 230 feet. Fabricated from custom-made terracotta tiles created in Guadalajara, Mexico, the floor-based work echoes the accumulative repetition of the building’s historic brick masonry, while the tiles’ colorful, glossy glaze and wavy design form a vast, dynamic ground that seems to extend into the horizon.
Crowner welcomes viewers to stand on, walk across, or even dance around the light-refracting composition, encouraging an experience that shifts our relationship to painting. Crowner’s work also functions as a foundation for a group of stretched drop cloths sourced from the SCAD fibers department’s screen-printing lab, displaying the accumulated layers from years of use by students and faculty. These collaborative canvases transform a potentially overlooked surface into something laden with meaning and aesthetic merit, evoking the reframed viewpoint that her installation offers. An inclusive, expansive gesture, Platform as Platform enjoins us to reconsider how we see the world.
About the artist
Sarah Crowner’s (b. 1974, Philadelphia; lives and works in New York) work has been featured in exhibitions and installations including Beetle in the Leaves, MASS MoCA, North Adams, Mass.; Platform (Blue Green Terracotta for JC), Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas; Serpentear, Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico; Blues in Greens | Greens in Blues, Instituto Bardi/Casa de Vidro and Auroras, São Paulo; Around Orange, Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis; and The Sea, the Sky, a Window, Hill Art Foundation, New York. An upcoming solo project will be mounted at the Bass Museum of Art, Miami, in 2025. Crowner’s work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Contemporary Austin, Texas; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; MASS MoCA; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Credits
Platform as Platform is organized by SCAD Museum of Art chief curator Daniel S. Palmer and presented as part of SCAD deFINE ART 2025.
