Ashon Crawley’s work as an artist begins with feeling. Growing up in a vibrant community of Blackpentecostalism, Crawley has a life perspective shaped by spirituality and rituals channeled through the body. He points to singing loudly, dancing, shouting, and speaking in tongues as influences in the way he expresses himself creatively, and these physical actions have manifested into tools in his visual art process.
In a performance he describes as “shouting on canvas,” Crawley uses music, clapping, dancing, and even tambourine rhythms to splatter and apply paint with his hands and feet.
Crawley’s desire to connect with the things he loves about his church exists in stark contrast with his aversion to its doctrine on queerness, and that conflict also informs his artistry.
The resulting work combines audio/visual montage with paintings that incorporate scripture, hymns, and concordance material into art that is bright and energetic, without losing the solemnity of its greater message.—Tami Keaveny
Ashon Crawley: “What my art practice is an attempt to do is to feel something akin to what I felt in the church world, but in a way that honors and allows to flower and flourish the complexity of queer relations and agnostic belief. So shouting on canvas with pigment powder on my feet to mark the surfaces with the residue of praise seems like a memorial and desire to be in dense relation with the world that made me possible. But it also is a critical intervention into its homophobia and transphobia and general antagonistic relation to nonheteronormative eroticism.”