There is an enduring fluidity in Jerstin Crosby’s work—a commitment to experimentation that moves seamlessly across his interdisciplinary practice. This is most apparent where distinctions between media begin to dissolve: paintings become objects, and objects, in turn, take on the logic of images. From 2020 to 2023, Crosby worked with cut forms layered into shaped supports that extended from the wall, creating a depth both literal and illusory. More recently, he has shifted toward singular planes of canvas and paper, while maintaining an interest in the interplay between foreground and background—their push and pull, and occasional collapse. This spatial tension is one facet of a complex visual language Crosby has developed over time, unfolding across drawing, painting, and sculpture as an ongoing, interconnected exploration.

What first registers is a sense of visual immediacy—bright, flattened forms, familiar silhouettes, and a graphic sensibility that foregrounds gestural freedom and an active engagement with line. But the longer one looks, these elements begin to shift: figures and objects emerge and dissolve within layered structures, shapes operate as both figure and ground, and cutouts expose the wall behind, collapsing distinctions between image and support. There are multiple references at play here: the bold outlines, flattened color, and visual clarity of comic and zine aesthetics; a spatial instability akin to artists like Tomma Abts; and a connection to a Southern artistic legacy, particularly the patchwork logic of quiltmaking, where compositional structure is inseparable from a sense of tactility and material presence.

Crosby frequently returns to a tight vocabulary of motifs—faces, hands, lamps, speakers, boomboxes. Depending on how one reads the work, these objects can be seen as either symbols, or as recurring anchors within an evolving system. These elements are rearranged and reconfigured across works, creating a sense of continuity while allowing each piece to operate on its own terms. The result is a body of work that feels both modular and cumulative, as if each composition were part of a larger, ongoing construction.

At its core, Crosby’s practice is less about representation than about relationships—between parts and wholes, surface and structure, image and object. His works don’t settle into a single mode of viewing; instead, they ask to be read slowly, moving between recognition and abstraction, clarity and disorientation, with meaning unfolding over time.