“What Was Once the Sea Is Now a Desert”: Jack Craft in Santa Fe
by Michelle Kraft for Glasstire (Texas Visual Art) | June 6, 2023
There are two things I remember from the first time I went hiking in Caprock Canyon State Park, just north of Quitaque in the Texas Panhandle. First, being summer, the atmosphere was scorching like a brick oven. Heat radiated in waves off brilliant treeless terra cotta-hued cliffs sculpted by epochs of erosion, and absent of any possibility of attendant shade. It was an unforgiving, albeit beguiling landscape, sublime in its equal parts of beauty and arid brutality.
The second thing that struck me, upon approaching the dramatic escarpment of the South Prong, were the two-inch bands of white gypsum that striated the walls of the dry riverbed. The presence of these deposits was jarring — in their dramatic contrast in color, their fibrous texture, and their horizontal-linear regularity within the amorphous shapes of eroded cliffs. These crystalline formations in the Caprock Escarpment speak of geological upheaval, the passage of eons; they are a remnant of an era when this desert was an ocean.
John Robert “Jack” Craft’s exhibition of new works, entitled What Was Once the Sea Is Now a Desert, at the Kouri + Corrao Gallery in Santa Fe, seems — at first glance — to reflect upon these bygone ages. But Craft’s current oeuvre, encompassing both cast-iron sculpture and printed works on paper, is more Janus-like in its articulation. These pieces are both backward- and forwarding-looking — considering, simultaneously, beginnings, transitions, and endings.