CROON

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

To croon is to hum or sing in a soft, low voice, especially in a sentimental manner. It is a sound which hovers between comfort and ache, between intimacy and mourning. This exhibition takes its cue from that gesture, and the works presented here are born from the same impulse: to hold close what is fragile, to intone reverence for what could be lost, and to grasp at something primal, ancient, and anarchic.

My practice is grounded in preservation and transformation. I work with what is available: discarded objects, fragile materials, found footage, landscape, lived memory - and follow their urgencies. The act of making is rarely neat; it emerges from rupture: loss, dispossession, ecological crisis, the weight of history. Yet within those fractures, I search for wholeness, for gestures of care, for moments when the broken can be transformed into allegory.

Each piece in CROON is both deeply personal and resonant with broader histories. Grief Tokens carries the remnants of a love now dissolved, improvised into delicate forms that are part memorial, part celebration through repetition and material constraint. Pilgrimage to Waterfall Land preserves a fleeting encounter with a landscape, using film and sound to soothe and still the spirit. Huma, an assemblage of scavenged materials, becomes a figure of grace rising from ruin.

Land and inheritance appear throughout this body of work. Highway 191 speaks to the complexity of belonging and estrangement in a desert landscape shaped by both Native American cosmology and settler colonialism. Spell Candles from Amazon turns mass-produced packaging into subtle reliquaries, holding up the uneasy truth that spirituality is not exempt from hegemony, that complicity threads through us all.

Other works dwell in the psychic interior: My Friend, Madness traces the struggle for agency amid fragmentation and instability, while Broom 1 honors the vitality of a tool long associated with both labor and persecution. In Undertaking Pink, the drama of flamingos and marabou storks stages the tension between beauty and brutality, innocence and survival - a mirror to human hierarchies, power, and political struggle.

Across these works runs a fascination with contradiction: grief and celebration, tenderness and violence, innocence and complicity. They are informed by the legacies of Romanticism and a longing for something ancient and enduring, yet remain rooted in the urgencies of the present: poverty, ecological collapse, and communal grief. Underneath is a vision for a family of man, an insistence on shared vulnerability and continuity across time, culture, and species.

ARTIST BIO

Gerald Martindill is an artist, filmmaker, and writer based in California’s Inland Empire. Raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, Martindill’s work reflects an early affinity towards Ozark folk traditions, Liberation theology, and American counterculture. He studied Liberal Arts at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, which cultivated a commitment to the legacies of Romanticism, underground cinema, religious history, and creative writing.

He is an MFA-candidate at UC Riverside and this year, he was awarded The Carpenter Fellowship, which will fund an upcoming documentary about Radical Faerie Sanctuaries. Prior to his graduate studies, Martindill worked in Los Angeles at The ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives and RuPaul’s Drag Race.