Savannah Crawford
Savannah Crawford
Savannah Crawford is a multimedia artist with a BFA in printmaking and a minor in art history from Ohio University. Although printmaking is her key discipline, she often incorporates painting, drawing, mixed
media, video, and photography into her art. While her past work has been largely based on exploring synesthesia as well as other neurological and psychological phenomena, her ongoing work touches on many different concepts. She has long compared her method of creating to that of a magpie, a bird known for collecting treasures and winding them into its nest. This comparison is also consistent with how she hopes viewers interact with her work, sharing what she has found, while also allowing them to discern what is most meaningful, and to carry it with them.
Artist Statement for “We’re all Just Trying to Heal from Something”
It can often feel like we are all drowning, as ifthere isnothing to hold onto. Thereis a sense of hopelessness that comes from looking around for a hand to hold only to see others submerged. Yet, there is the nagging of hope just above the mire, at first seeming to mock, but truthfully beckoning us to healourselves and to heal each other.
My work takes small discarded objects, sounds, and movements that seem silent and insignificant, and reemphasizes them to show both the strength and trauma in marginality. A key aspect I explore is the relationship between “authenticity” and race. In the series ‘The Only 8 Things You Need’, viewers are presented with eight words for Latin Americans foods that while still technically written in Spanish, have been acculturated into white American food culture. They are familiar to the the viewer as a consumer, even as most viewers might have no connection to Spanish as a language. In this way, these eight words are permitted and celebrated in a way that immigrant bodies or Spanish-speaking bodies are not in the US. Both the sound wave and the pronunciation guide work as teaching tools for language “correctness” for a word that is a cultural item. This is further emphasized by the hand-rubbed quality of each print - another aspect of this language game that conflates the repeated feeling and rubbing of this dimensional sound wave on paper with attempting to learn, to feel out the “correct” way this word can be understood and pronounced. Yet these words, despite being paired with a pronunciation guide, and the aural data of a sound wave, seem more obfuscated than ever. It is stark, removed from from the color and “otherness” that a cultural context or brown body might give. Bleached and ghost-like, where lies the authenticity in such a fraught cultural item? What does it mean to give a word “correct” pronunciation and how is this understood within racist histories of language, accents, and the taking of goods and labor?
