Mutsu Crispin

“I like to boil down a piece of art until it’s essential, until it almost disappears, until the stark poetry of it rings clear. There’s a powerful impulse towards simplicity, clarity, and innocence. I allow myself to be playful with it all, and there’s often a wink or a laugh inhabiting pieces dealing with the most challenging themes of isolation, initiation, trauma, struggle… Childhood experience is very alive in the work — many of the materials and forms evoke retro-futuristic toys, utilized now as totems of spiritual passage, transformation and ascension.

I take a joyful interest, sometimes bordering on obsession, in my chosen materials and the precise engineering of a sculpture. Many of the pieces are crafted from layers of vibrantly tinted plexiglass, laser cut and assembled into different designs, often fantastical or hypnotic. Variations are puzzled together, with the same underlying narratives and associations explored through myriad palettes of color, reflection & transparency. In some sculptures, mirrors and lights are utilized to create the illusion of infinite depth which is then harnessed as a poetic field. All of the work strives to illuminate the deepest threads fathomed personally or collectively, and to find a way to manifest them as something edifying and empowering, that imparts a measure of hope and joy, and that calls clearly to our best selves.”

Mutsu Crispin (aka John DiGeorge) is based in Haiku, Hawaii and New England. He grew up near Atlanta, GA playing in streams, collecting Legos, watching cartoons, and triumphing at video games. He studied Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University with a focus on oneiric cinema (films dealing with dreams and other altered states of consciousness). After working on a variety of projects in Boston and NYC, he moved to southern Vermont and directed an independent feature film titled Redbelly, now in the last stages of postproduction. He has exhibited sculpture, created public art installations, worked as a welder, performed as a dancer and clown, and run a small design company.

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