color/form: Jerstin Crosby

Artist Biography & Statement

Jerstin Crosby (he/him) is an American artist based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He currently makes elaborately realized paintings and objects assembled from layers of hand-cut and laser-cut segments, realized in saturated tones. Crosby has used digital tools from early in his practice, starting with the emergence of programs like MS Paint, which has influenced his aesthetic in its colorful simplicity. His work raises questions of our deepening relationship to technology and the flattening effect of our lives, as we attempt to translate ourselves into virtual realms. In his recent work, Crosby relies on software to push beyond painterly instincts using a limited vocabulary of elements that sum total into sordid faces. The resulting portraits are both familiar and distant, perhaps post-human relics. The distorted figures are intended to be viewed as fully-formed characters rather than abstractions to be contrasted against our assumptions of human likeness. 

Crosby’s work extends beyond the studio into public art. He has exhibited at the Nasher Museum of Art, Speed Art Museum, Queens Museum, Cell Projects, Exit Art, the Mattress Factory, LUMP, and Kallio Kunsthalle Taidehalli in Helsinki. His exhibitions have been written about in publications such as Art Forum. Art Papers, and NPR Weekend Edition. He received an MFA from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. 

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