E.G. Crichton is a cross-media artist using digital and mixed media to explore social issues, history, and site specific subject matter.  In recent years she has collaborated across disciplines with a performer, furniture artist, writer, experimental composer and art historian.  Her work has been exhibited in galleries and as temporal public installations in the U.S., England and Norway.  She is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of California, Santa Cruz.


Crichton is co-teaching a workshop with Susan Working called "Shaped Video: Working with space, objects and video". This course is hosted by the digital media and wood programs and is running from August 13th - 24th 2007. She has also been a resident in the Digital Media Program.

MATTER OUT OF PLACE

Matter out of Place is a series of digital images formed by experiments with ordinary household ingredients.  I create them on my scanner and in my computer, first as chemical reactions between consumer products and later as digital apparitions that take on the appearance of microscopic, cosmic, and aerial mapping.
The term “Matter out of Place” is a definition of dirt invented by anthropologist Mary Douglas in her classic work Purity and Danger. This project grows out of my interest in cultural notions of purity, cleanliness, and civilization that I first explored in the photographic series Spotless. In Matter Out of Place, the discrete exploded soap iconography that so closely referenced the body and its organs has mutated into more abstract patterns, creating tension between a striking beauty and the revelation of its artifice, the ordinariness of its representational ingredients. Through the visual seduction of pseudo-scientific imaging, I look for larger metaphors of disturbance and displacement.