These remarkable relief constructions span the middle career of Jill Crossen-Sargent (b.1030), a Canadian artist now living in Toronto.  Her life has been a model of perseverance over a time when recognition for female artists was difficult to obtain.  Except for fleeting moments, she worked in obscurity.

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In 1968 Crossen –Sargent left Montreal for Cambridge, Massachusetts, primed to find a new way to work.  At the Sears Lighting Department and Eli Heffron, the famed electronic surplus emporium and parts dump for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer science labs, she found materials that would sustain her practice for years to come.  “Egg crate” (plastic grid used in fluorescent light fixtures) was fashioned into lustrous labyrinthine compositions: talismans of the information age, these enigmatic works presided over technology’s capacity for either progress or menace.  The artists responded to such period hallmarks as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and the soaring installation by Op artist Jesus Rafael Soto in the Venezuelan pavilion at Expo 67, in addition to the troubling era of war, assassinations, and societal unrest.  Her restriction to silver, gold, black and white stood in austere contrast to the cosmetically bright palette of pop art.

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From 1970 to 1986, Crossen-Sargent lived in Saskatoon, continuing to develop her method.  Multi-Dimensional Space (1979) was her breakthrough work that arose from the properties of a new material.  The misty brush surfaces of anodized aluminum led to new manipulations of light and space.  Dense, dynamic, destabilizing patterns were extracted from the orderly grid, simultaneously suggesting cubist picture space, aerial perspective and the dense architecture of a microchip.  In isolation Crossen-Sargent intuitively created an original body of work that, without the theoretical underpinnings, paralleled the advent of neoconceptual painting in New York.

 

 

(Written in conjunction with Crossen-Sargent’s exhibit shown at the AGO September 25’04 to January 3’05 curated by Ben Portis, Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art ant the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada)