Connor Crawford at Shore

The different Vibes of People is like a performance of a global catwalk runway through a Potemkin village. Crawford’s works both on the wall and off, shapeshift as double agents and animate themselves accordingly. A cast of doppelgangers cum models, united in disarming the constant forging of alliances between art and life. Their mercy, merchants and merchandise, all congeal in a vast used future.

The viewer here is now in an immortal city rat-race, walking around Vienna’s Ringstrasse as though in a runaway texture simulation. While the architectural and sculptural styles vary of the city like that of an individual, morphing into a kind of nebulous personality, these works compile back around the open face of the city. Our backroom smoker is a double agent of the future, where we find its rhythm, of the schisms of a bare bone world. Sitting tight, hurrying up to wait it out, a slow graveyard shift in the 24/7 hustle.

The work throughout presents us with an image of the throttled people of the picture pipeline, a torrent rushing down the boulevard/runway of our atomised Haussmann city. These denizens of our punctured capital, capitalist dreamscape is of
the primary effect; Courtesy of the punk and businessman. In Paris during the Haussmannization of the city, people were pushed out of the inner city, out of the darkness. Crawford assembles and converts the slippages and spills of the city into a cast of times ahead. The opposite of Benjamin’s angel of history flying backwards into destruction, here we will walk off on our own, staring each other down, passing them in the street, they’re always coming out ahead.

– Simon Shim-Sutcliffe