OPENING 3pm SATURDAY 1 AUGUST. All Welcome

Elisa Crossing’s solo exhibition Move me! is her instinctive response to the question: what do I want paintings to do? She explores the active and embodied nature of looking, building on the theme of “slow looking”, a position that runs counter to the ethos of the digital economy venerating speed and promising us the joy of “frictionless” experiences.

Incorporating scenes of the artist‘s studio, the site of active looking, and inspiration from the bodily rhythm implied in Fragonard’s painting The Swing, these paintings have been made to mirror the to and fro of the painter in the studio, leaning forward to paint and stepping back to reflect. Up close, details in the painting dissolve into abstraction and sensation. From a distance, rhythms, structures, and contexts emerge. From this oscillation between intimacy and distance it is revealed that seeing is never fixed or complete.

It follows that these paintings also have no fixed narratives. Rather they are about spaces, proximity, attraction, and resistance, about the friction at the borders where ideas meet and generate harmonies or dissonances. Like the suspended figure in the Swing, these works shift between past and present, abstraction and reality, the artist and the viewer. Their meaning remains to be made by the viewer who is moved to see, to feel, and to reflect.

Elisa Crossing is an innovative, enthusiastic and much-loved arts educator at the ANU School of Art & Design. Her professional career as a visual artist spans three decades with ten solo exhibitions and over 30 group shows. Civic Art Bureau is delighted to present her latest exhibition of paintings.