Logan Crompton

MFA 2025

Through the abstraction of the Black figure in digital space, I intend to offer anonymity and protection to combat objectification, fetishization, and commodification of the Black experience. I do this through reappropriation of memes utilizing images of Black people, or aspects of Black culture. In these memes where Black people are the subjects, I abstract and obscure, emphasizing the making process in the viewing experience. 

Although working in assemblage materially, my practice embraces the illusionistic possibilities of a painting’s surface and in turn painting’s ability to promote, invent, and transform myths. My research, material explorations, and practice situate digital memes as a compositional/visual strategy that mirrors painting in function. This materializes itself through the layering and collaging of transparencies to stack and imbed, blurring the lines of applied and immersed histories. In this way the work calls upon the history of memes both online and offline, where memes exist as all forms of encoded dissemination. I embrace a meme’s potential to transport audiences and transform subjects through its mythology. 

I utilize varying combinations of fabric, iconography, machine, and hand interventions of sewing, drawing, image transfers, laser engraving, and text in my work. I rely specifically on photoshop, packing tape transfers, cyanotype, and sublimation transfer to imbed the material matrixes of a surface within the appropriated image, reflecting the internal structure of a meme that allows it to transport its audience.