Billy Crosby

At Nada Miami Well Projects will present Dreamers the newest iteration of collaborative work by Billy Crosby and Siân Newlove-Drew, as an installation of sculpture and painting. The duo make work through the prism of their romantic relationship, with the work a worlding manifestation between them- it is info dumping, parallel playing, glowing neurological excitement, and an engulfing spree of activity. With Crosby being predominately a painter and Newlove-Drew working in sculpture and installation, for them, the work made is an exciting divergence and expansion from their own individual practices, where different sensibilities seep into and merge in generous stints in the studio together.

The wall-based work presented in Dreamers are stretched digital prints on silk, elongated, almost panoramic landscapes, that are painted, and dyed, and worked into with pigment, wire, or embroidered, and collaged with delicate, ephemeral, collected materials; butterfly wings, stamps, lucky clovers, and dried foliage from their home. Some of the prints feature different characters- collaged embroidered ‘heads’ made of inkjet prints, wire, or thread. The characters are considered the ‘dreamers’, they animate the world into a populated narratable space. Conduits or containers for where ideas and dreams gather and diffuse.

The worlds on the prints distort and twist, as if to portray as many perspectives together as possible - the micro warps into the macro, deep water becomes a fisheye lens, lens flares become horizons with trees that turn into fishing rods, fishing rods that become branches with flowers that turn into fish or pebbles, etc, etc. The fishing rod is a humorous and recurring motif in the environment, as insignia to the patience and generating of ideas. The artists made the digital prints with open-source generative AI model Stable Diffusion and see them as ‘hyper-collages’, thinking about image generation tools as a kind of cultural technology, a psychedelic record of human history and activity.

The artists used varied text and image prompts, some coming from the Hudson River Valley School of painting, a colonial style of painting that European settlers used to present America as a sublime untouched wilderness, pure and uninhabited. Smattered in are other loaded references to bucolic English countryside, kawaii, Matryoshka dolls, blossom, evil spirits, rainbows, ponds – used in this way as detached worlding signifiers, cultural node strings of data, whirling into one another by a logic of half perceived forces and associations. Crosby and Newlove-Drew speak to the cross pollination between worlds and the space they are working in, being one that is varied and changing, in and out.

A romantic relationship too, has its own energy and animating forces. As well as envelopes the artists use the Matryoshka doll as a signifier of this personal data and interiority and distinct personal ‘megastructure’. Matryoshka dolls are also charming, cute, and nesting, placed inside one-another. In one sculpture, one is hung from a seven-foot fishing reel. They refer to the ‘Matryoshka Brain’: a hypothetical astronomical megastructure, which is made of multiple Dyson Spheres, holding the energy of trillions of stars, thus driving enormous power, that could run simulations of an entire universe. For Crosby and Newlove-Drew their collaboration is a part of their own special sphere of world and relationship building, where communications and feelings are dispersed, shared, and nestled and a reservoir of energy. Art making is a way the artists animate their world, finding that the same enormous emotion that seems to permeate everything, too fits inside the tiniest envelope on the most delicate of string.