Boylston artist headlining show at Fitchburg museum

FITCHBURG - Boylston resident Carrie Crane has been making and exhibiting art since the early 1990s.

You can see an exhibit of her work, "Carrie Crane: Beyond Measure," at the Fitchburg Art Museum July 21 to Sept. 1.

Crane's solo exhibition at FAM features instruments and graphic displays that "seemingly seek to know the unknowable by attempting to capture and quantify the most elusive of things: the unseen, the unheard, and the forgotten," according to press material on the exhibit. "She synthesizes the visual languages of both the arts and the sciences to explore the territories between truth and fiction, analysis and imagination, and precision and extrapolation. Crane’s attempts to grasp the fleeting and the ineffable result in eloquent abstractions with roots in the work of her forebears, the early 20th-century pioneers of non-objective painting: Hilma af Klint, Wassily Kandinsky, František Kupka, and Kazimir Malevich. Crane’s work ultimately finds truth in emotion, and underscores art’s important role in expressing and coming to grips with ambiguity."

Crane won first prize in last summer's regional exhibition of art and craft at the museum. She said her current work is conceptual, and "explores the idea of measuring the immeasurable. I create what appear to be functioning scientific instruments that measure and analyze memories and emotions and produce imagined graphic results or 'infographics,' in a way. They take the form of 2D wall pieces that resemble maps, graphs or charts."

Crane said you can check out some of the work on becomingtruth.art.

"My work is not media specific. I paint, I build objects (instruments) from found materials, I use paper, plexiglass, fabricated pvc and plywood, and other substrates, whatever I need to get the job done," she said.  "In my work, using the instruments, I draw attention, often in a subtly humorous way, to the emotional side of ideas; how color makes us feel, the melancholy of lost memories due to sea level rise, the geometry of personal relationships. By doing this I hope to provide the visitor with a cathartic moment, a moment when they might be inspired to project their individual experience onto the work and walk away with a small insight, or at least a chuckle."

Crane said her inspiration comes from other artists working in the area of "parafiction," a term used to describe an emergent genre of artwork that plays in the overlap between fact and fiction.

If people want to know more they can visit both websites: carriecrane.com and becomingtruth.art.