—Alex Jen, Hyperallergic
Crocodile (2016) is reproduced from the precise and beautifully designed catalog to painter Leidy Churchman’s first U.S. survey, at the Hessel Museum of Art, which was reviewed recently in Hyperallergic, where Alex Jen comments on their “beautiful peculiarity.” In a published interview in the book, Churchman tells Lauren Cornell, chief curator at CCS Bard, “When painting happens for me, it’s more like collecting caterpillars on a summer night, being both delighted and grossed out, or it’s driven by a desire to take care of something that is completely unknown.
—Cory Reynolds, ARTBOOK Blog
Here’s writer Alex Kitnick, in an essay about Churchman’s work in the Crocodile catalogue (a handsome new tome): “There are patterns here, just as there would be in an archive of web searches, but there is also a radical juxtaposition between things that are hard to make coherent. The shape of the constellation is big and diffuse.” And then: “His interest, I think, is less in burrowing into things and reading them than in moving around their edges. Once, someone might have called that superficial, but today it might be one way of sensing (not making sense of) the glut of the world.”
—Andy Battaglia, Art News