Sydney Croskery’s artistic process differs from other artists because of her use of a computer database as a tool.
This approach arises from her two years as a front-end web programmer in a web house after graduate school.
In this role, Croskery learned to use databases that held information her clients wanted displayed on the website she had designed for them. With this experience, Croskery has spent the last four years collecting everyday objects and categorizing them into a database.
Anything that Croskery comes across in daily life- junk mail, consumer packaging and social media posts may be collected.
After collecting an object, Croskery takes note of its details and any narrative story attached then takes a photograph of the object and archives the details and photos into a computer database. Details like the color, emotions felt, and other features are recorded about the object.
Croskery reached 2,000 entries before she started using the database as both inspiration and subject matter
for her artwork.
“When I started, I didn’t really know what I was doing,” Croskery said, “it was a reaction to general overstimulation.”
The database allows Croskery to search for objects that she has placed into several different categories. For example, she could search for objects of a specific shape, or words that relate to certain emotions and any items matching this criteria will show up in a page of results.
Croskery creates artwork that is inspired by and contains the subject matter of these search results. Croskery’s “Messages” art exhibit at Citrus College Art Gallery is full of artwork created by this process.
One piece of artwork that stood out was “Rainbow Plastics”, displaying the top of a small battery, a piece of junk mail and a bag formerly used to carry tomatoes, juxtaposed in an
aesthetically pleasing way. “I try to find the most interesting square inch of everyday items,” Croskery said.
The artwork titled, “herein Lie the messages” was another piece that caught a lot of attention.
“Each object has a meaning and it makes me sad that objects that once were meaningful to us end up as junk,” Alejandra Guerrero, Citrus College studio art major, said. “But once they are all out together it gives a completely different feeling, almost homesick.”
All of the artwork was created in shades of black and white by using charcoal or graphite on paper.
The theme of the artwork is the overstimulation we feel in contemporary society, Croskery explained.
One could compare what Croskery is doing to a form of cultural anthropology.
Sydney Croskery’s “Messages” art exhibit is on display at Citrus College Art Gallery until May 17.
