JAMES CROAK PRESS
WHITE HOT MAGAZINE, Peter Frank
December, 2020 Tableaux Survivants: James Croak's Prescient "New Skins" "The work of James Croak is on exhibit for the first time in five years , surveyed in a (too-)small show at MM Fine Art in Southampton (New York). These rollicking, phantasmagorical, literally spectacular sculptures, going back almost three decades, brim with the imagistic and material bravado, as well as the grimly witty social assessment, we associate with an older generation of American assemblagists..." |
EAST HAMPTON STAR, Mark Segal
January 7, 2021 James Croak's Feet of Clay, Hands of Dust In 1985, shortly after moving from Los Angeles to Brooklyn, James Croak was inspired to work with a new and unlikely sculptural material: dirt. Earlier in his career, he had witnessed taxidermists mixing sawdust with glue to create forms that could be molded before hardening. “I didn’t have any sawdust around,” he said during a recent conversation, “but somebody had been excavating next door to where I was living. So I loaded a pail with dirt, dumped it on the ground, and made something -- I think it was a head -- out of dirt and glue. I had never heard of anybody doing that before.” |