Some Things From my Grandma’s Basement
Works by Quin Crumb
Organized in loving memory of and by Dry Ice Gallery

My grandma’s basement has been a creative space for about as long as I can remember. My mother, siblings, and I have all had a hand in transforming the dingy dark basement into a slightly less dingy, slightly less dark art studio. When I was a child my oldest sister and her friends used the space to play music and make paintings, photos, costumes, and spray paint stencils fueled by the Chatt punk scene. My aunt used the space later to make candles, cards, drawings, and paintings as she explored Buddhist ideas such as zen and materialistic minimalism. My other sister and I then took over the space and outfitted it as a painting/screen printing studio. She needed a studio to paint in after graduating college and I was really excited to be able to make T-shirts. Ultimately my sister moved and I have used it as a general purpose space to collaborate on art with friends, print t-shirts for other friends, make collages, store junk, paint, sculpt, daydream, and store more junk. Throughout this time the space has continued to function as any normal basement would. There are cleaning supplies, old sports equipment, paints, yard tools, seasonal decorations, and old keep sakes sprinkled throughout all the art and art supplies. It’s also a good spot to sneak away and hang out with siblings during family get-to-togethers. Needless to say there is a lot of shit in there and the only real cohesion between all of it is the space it’s in.

My grandma’s basement has provided materials and an underlying structure to make the works in this show. They have an inherent cohesion created by the objects proximity in space and that may very well be all they have. Though the works all have sprouted in my grandma’s basement, they’ve been allowed to grow uninhibited into their current forms. Making these works was a process of being vulnerable with and listening carefully to objects and images. As well as confronting and challenging my identity and the identity of the things in front of me [who am I? No better question, who is this lamp?]. While always making a lot of bad jokes and sometimes stumbling onto a good one. These works are explorations of absurdity, functionality, failure, craftsmanship, vulnerability, mending, masculinity, tension, care, narrative, pitifulness, perspective, connections, uncertainty, play, precarious positions, more failure, problem solving, even more failure and finally acceptance.