IF YOU BUILD IT, WE WILL BURN IT

If You Build It We will Burn It is an exhibition of two interrelated installations by Jerstin Crosby. In these works, Crosby lists among his references conceptual starting points such as vegetarianism, environmental extremism, 80's sitcoms, TV commercials, local news shows, community bulletin boards, subversive counter cultures, and medieval Flemish tapestries.

More overt artistic references occur in the smaller of the two installations, titled, Visual Representation of Invisible Processes. Here, Crosby cross-references last century art history influences like Land Art and Calder's mobile sculptures by adhering meticulously-modeled ceramic trail-mix to a black and white poster of Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty", and by creating a kinetic sculpture from collaged vegetarian food packages and poorly-braided hemp.

In the main room of the gallery, a more subtle installation allows one to enter a one-bedroom apartment that was burned to the ground by environmentally-motivated activists. It acts as a cage around the viewers while both romanticizing the event and playing off of recent installations by artists Michael Asher, and William Cordova.

Jerstin Crosby currently lives and makes work in Hillsborough, NC, and was born in Dothan, Alabama in 1979. He is an active member of the Lump-based collaborative group Team Lump, and producer of Acid Rain Production, a community access tv show that broadcasts new media and video art. His work has been exhibited at the Southeastern Center of Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, the Bemis Center of Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE, Cell Project Space, London, UK, Heaven Gallery, Chicago, IL, and Exit Art, NYC, among others. This is his second solo exhibition at Lump.