Crasis: Rude Screen

TRULAND GALLERY, LOWER LEVEL
In Rude Screen, the artist duo Crasis uses sculpture, video, and installation to consider themes of longing, seduction, evasion, and capture. Reinterpreting a visual language derived from medieval liturgical forms and science fiction, Crasis creates sculptures which function as hybrid screens. These forms are made by integrating a range of organic and industrial materials including aquaresin, algae, silk, and steel. Perverse and tender, aggressive and abject, alien and earthly, the figures triangulate between the viewer and the contemporary experience of separation from nature–both ecological nature and the nature inside ourselves.

The title Rude Screen references the architectural history of the Rood Screen, a partition that traditionally separated the nave from the chancel in medieval churches. These ornate dividers marked the threshold between the churchgoers and the sacred objects enclosed within; a liminal space inviting contemplation while both revealing and concealing what lay beyond. Crasis reinterprets this form as a conceptual framework for reflecting broadly on screens as a rapidly proliferating category of technologies which increasingly mediate reality.

Both science fiction and Christian theology have at their core stories of transcendence from the world as we experience it in daily life. These stories of escape can open portals for reuniting with nature, or reflect a desire to abandon it. In a world jolting towards an uncertain future, the exhibition provides the screen but refuses the remedy.  Rude Screen offers a threshold on which to pause, partially, painfully, between flooding and floating away.

Crasis: Rude Screen takes place as part of MoCA Arlington’s SOLOS 2026, part of the Museum’s long-running SOLOS exhibition program. Launched in 1988, SOLOS features solo exhibitions by artists based in the Mid-Atlantic region who are working at the forefront of contemporary art.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Crasis (/krey-sis/ from the Greek κρᾶσις, “mixing”, “blending”) is a transdisciplinary collaborative duo made up of Andy P. Davis and Anne Lukins. Collaborating since 2020, Crasis has held residencies including Galveston Artist Residency in Galveston, TX, Stove Works in Chattanooga, TN, and WheatonArts in Millville, NJ. Crasis has performed and exhibited at venues in the US and abroad including Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, TX, A Leste in Porto, Portugal, Vox Populi Gallery and Icebox Project Space, Philadelphia, PA, Yes We Cannibal in Baton Rouge, LA, and Centrum in Port Townsend, WA.

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