Cameron Crawford

Narrator: Cameron Crawford discusses one of the sculptures he contributed to the Biennial, a crocheted monofilament curtain.

Cameron Crawford: I was specifically interested in the deaths of six people that I knew, some of whom I had ambivalent feelings about and some of whom I was close with. I was interested in the fact that I was sad for each of those deaths, seemingly detached—or that sadness seemingly didn't depend on the degree of affection or esteem I had for each of the people individually. In this way I was bothered but also interested in the way that that feeling reduced all of them to the same kind of stimulus and that in that way they all became interchangeable, kind of single abstract units that might as well be one another. I thought that that reduction of a person into that idea was unpleasant. So I wanted to make something to try and think about that for—I think almost a year.

The curtain represents those kind of units repeated over and over again both in the crochet loops and also in the one-foot-by-one-foot grid and also that blocked or frustrated impulse towards transcendence.

And so it made sense to have a large net-like curtain that would be almost invisible that would consist of repeated units and that would foreclose a certain quantity of space and that in doing so, in making a space that couldn’t be penetrated or accessed, would make that space metaphysically solid and opaque, but at the same time utterly transparent and so frustrating to theorize.