Garden, Thriving, 2016

The left panel of Crosby’s diptych, or two-part painting, Garden, Thriving depicts a room with peach and pink walls opening onto a garden of verdant tropical plants. In the right panel, a young couple (the artist and her husband) cuddles tenderly, seated at a table on which a laptop screen faces the viewer.

Crosby frequently emphasizes screens, frames, windows, and doorways to address her work towards convoluted spaces such as her native Nigeria, which is a prime example of a cultural “contact zone” by virtue of British colonial rule and the pervasiveness of American pop culture since Nigeria’s independence in 1960. Thus, the layering of photographic images within the chairs’ upholstery fabric and the garden’s plant leaves is a visual metaphor for the layers of Nigerian cultural history and Crosby’s personal memories. The images—pictures of Nigerian pop stars, models, celebrities, and military dictators and the artist’s snapshots—function as doorways into other places and times. The work’s amalgamation of media and techniques—paint, colored pencil, collage, and phototransfers (a technique that allows the artist to lift images from newspaper or magazine clippings)—is another manifestation of our hybridized, global society.