©Thomas Crawford, One Dozen

This past December, I had the great pleasure of meeting Thomas Crawford and his work at the PhotoNOLA Portfolio Reviews, and then sharing wallspace with him in the Currents 2025 Exhibition at the Ogden Museum. His creative methodology to considering landscape through satellite imagery is fascinating. He is using the human built environment as a starting point to create his M.C. Escher-like constructions that force our eye to wander like a Tetrus game, through neighborhoods and parking lots, as he states, “eyesores” of urban blight. If you look carefully at some of the works, you will find something more…tools, perhaps?

©Thomas Crawford, embedded

Overlooked

My photo landscapes, all derived from satellite imagery, do not idealize conventional beauty found in mountain vistas or pastoral valleys.  Instead, they show unexpected beauty in urban settings often dismissed as eyesores.

Parking lots, for instance, usually create empty and unsightly peripheries around downtown high-rise districts. Seen from above and rearranged with Photoshop, the lots in One Dozen (2023) form a beautiful urban mosaic.  No longer representing emptiness, the reimagined parking lots can be seen with appreciation instead of disdain.

Rather than presenting eye-level perspectives, my landscapes are always shown from above.  They display vast urban worksites filled with factories, warehouses, and construction sites.  As someone who makes things, I am especially drawn to settings where work gets done.  The streets and buildings are rearranged with Photoshop to create entirely new landscapes according to my own vision, fantasy, or whim.

Departing from convention, many of my aerial landscapes are overlaid with enlarged and carefully camouflaged hand tools, yielding figure-ground compositions that are initially difficult to see.  Whereas figure-ground compositions normally emphasize sharp contrasts, their delineation in my work is subtle and delicate.  Depending on how they are viewed, the oversized tools either emerge from or disappear into the aerial landscapes below.  The longer we look, the more the imagery morphs, the boundaries blur, and our familiar orientation slips away.

Although derived from photos, my landscapes are intended to read as paintings, dreams, visions, even hallucinations.  Intentionally disorienting, these multi-level landscapes invite viewers to decipher different layers and contemplate their interconnection.  For me, the hand tools and worksites (and camouflage linking them) emphasize their role in transformation and change when anything new is built or created.

©Thomas Crawford, Quick Squares 1

Tom Crawford is a visual artist whose work explores alternative conceptualizations of landscape art, mostly viewed from an aerial perspective.  In his ongoing project, Overlooked, he rearranges satellite photos of vast residential and industrial settings with Photoshop to create entirely new urban landscapes.  Many are overlaid with enlarged and carefully camouflaged hand tools that blend in with the vast urban settings below.  By juxtaposing hand tools with housing developments and industrial parks, his artwork connects urban landscapes with hammers, saws, and shovels once used to make them.

In his earlier USGS Map Project, Crawford used historical contour maps to make landscapes of great geological monuments in Utah and Arizona, major waterways in Indiana and Ohio, and great urban centers like Portland.  Presented in vertical panels, these landscapes display topographic data, exquisite pen-and-ink drawings, and tableaus of unexpected shapes all at the same time.  His topographic landscapes read mostly as abstract forms – some recognizable, others defying description.

By blurring boundaries between landscape photography, topography, urban design, and abstract art, Crawford reimagines how landscapes can be seen as an art form.

His altered landscapes have been shown at the Ogden Museum in New Orleans, LA, Cape Cod Museum of Art in Dennis, MA, and Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts in Providence, RI.  His works have been in juried group exhibitions in New York, Boston, Washington, Pittsburgh, Dallas, St. Louis, Kansas City, Portland, and the San Francisco Bay Area.  In addition to his art practice, Crawford has a PhD in clinical psychology from Columbia University.  He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Instagram:  @tomcrawford175

©Thomas Crawford, 7 Hammers

©Thomas Crawford, Between the Lines

©Thomas Crawford, Three Shovels

©Thomas Crawford, Hand Saws 1

©Thomas Crawford, Hand Saws 2

©Thomas Crawford, Hand Saws 3

©Thomas Crawford, Hand Saws 4

©Thomas Crawford, Split Asunder

©Thomas Crawford, Quick Squares 3

©Thomas Crawford, C Clamps

©Thomas Crawford, Hand & Hammer

©Thomas Crawford, Dallas Arms