Curatorial Statements

Interested in the relationship between the cyclical rhythms of nature and the personal experience of time and memory, Ann Craven has made repetition a cornerstone of her practice. No subject has occupied the artist more deeply than the moon, to which she dedicated her first exhibition three decades ago. In 2006 Craven began to assemble her lunar views into a comprehensive “laboratory,” from which we share the years 2020-2024. The compendium represents a celestial trajectory and personal one. “[The moon] is never the same,” notes Craven. “It allows me to see my own changes.” The images in turn, as she explains, invite “you to dream about your reality. Where were YOU at a given moment in time?” During the exhibition three curators respond to this prompt, allowing the show to evolve, much like the moon and the world it illuminates.

Ann Craven: Moons (Transformation) (May 22–June 30)

Galvanized by the moon, Ann Craven (American, born 1967) charts a course of personal evolution in her lunar nightscapes. In titles that she describes as “intimate, quiet poems,” parenthetical phrases position the paintings temporally, geographically, and psychically. Through clusters of paintings made on various days between 2020 and 2024, Craven’s process—a ritual—of repetition and rumination reveals itself. Her canvases capture the rising and sinking and the waxing and waning of the celestial orb throughout the seasons. We observe its intimate embrace by clouds and trees. In an urban setting illuminated by moonbeams, we witness the transformation of arboreal armatures into steel scaffolds. Even as it hovers on the edge of utter abstraction, the moon persists. “I’m grabbing time. Holding it,” Craven explains. In so doing, she also holds space, providing in her paintings an arena for perpetual becoming.

      - Anne Collins Goodyear, Co-Director, Bowdoin College Museum of Art

 

Moon Tones (July 1–18)

The moon is the perfect subject for art—eternally present yet easy to ignore, pondered and passed over, profound and cliché. It reflects, it projects. In Ann Craven’s hands, it becomes something else entirely—something seen again and again, each time newly alive. Her paintings repeat and diverge, a study in volume, variation, and sameness that verges on the obsessive. It’s like indexing the ineffable, a bulk epiphany built in paint. What are these works? They are direct transcriptions from the open air—portraits of the ephemeral rendered through Craven’s hand, eye, and vision. Time moves and halts within them. They are content and form, monotony and magic. A shape, a smear, a shimmer. They invoke vast depth yet remain deadeningly flat—resisting illusion while gesturing toward the infinite. The moon becomes presence, from phase to feeling, repetition as both devotion and disorientation.

    - Jay Sanders, Executive Director and Chief Curator, Artists Space.