August  7, 2022 / September 10, 2022

Heartbreak Hotel

Rosson Crow

833 East 3rd Street
Los Angeles CA 90013
Open: Tuesday – Sunday 11 – 6

Video

Over the Influence Los Angeles is thrilled to welcome you to Heartbreak Hotel, a hallucinatory dream sequence of new paintings by Rosson Crow.

The artist presents vignettes of past tragedies with entirely different outcomes. Many works reference the early 21st Century American West; rather than a roadside monument off highway 101 marking where James Dean fatefully crashed on September 30th 1955, Crow’s James Dean Car Wash encapsulates the site in the sprawling California desert where the late actor lives to set up a hallucinatory carwash experience. Travelers may slowly cruise through on a dreamy conveyor, past a series of synchronized machines, as spinning soapy hula skirts and dangling tentacles brush past. Crow’s revisionist compositions range from the deeply historical House of Jealous Lovers, depicting the 1544 parlor room where all of King Henry the VIII’s wives are living together at the same time, to the ultra-contemporary; The Deciders, a claustrophobic cacophony of all male U.S Presidents peering out in judgement as they decide your fate; a poignant response to the overturning of Rove v Wade.

ARTISTS

Rosson Crow

Los Angeles-based artist Rosson Crow densely layers her surfaces with acrylic, spray paint, xeroxed photo-transfers, oil, and enamel juxtaposing images and icons from various eras. Her subjects are often presented as discarded artifacts strewn through densely populated interiors or acid-washed landscapes, exploring an interest in how historic events are viewed differently over time. To decipher Crow’s works means to find the dichotomies within her compositions – man and nature, past and present – and ponder the symbiotic relationships between them.
Rosson Crow was born in 1982 in Dallas, Texas. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 2004 and a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University in 2006. Crow lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA.