Jer Crowle is a Vancouver-based interdisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, photography, and video installation. His practice explores the formalization of natural systems and the aesthetics of land use, drawing on his parallel background in communication and industrial design.
Jer Crowle is an interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver whose work spans painting, sculpture, photography, video installation, and design. Grounded in a practice that merges conceptual inquiry with material precision, his work navigates the tensions between natural systems and human attempts to formalize, extract, and rationalize them.
Crowle’s early engagement with painting evolved through influences ranging from Bacon and Close to Ruscha and Christo, resulting in a formal language that often juxtaposes gestural mark-making with typographic structure and photographic logic. His parallel career in design—particularly in communication and industrial design—continues to inform his approach to composition, spatial relationships, and the language of systems.
His recent work centers on long-form investigations into land, memory, and the aesthetics of transformation. Trees Rivers Roads, a project conceived as a personal land acknowledgment, explores the legacy of logging culture and the abstraction of natural forms through infrastructural and industrial frameworks. The companion body of work, Seven Sisters, comprises a series of portraits that articulate themes of kinship, care, and the paradox of representing organic relationships through formal visual systems. Both projects are conceived as parallel tracks—distinct yet interwoven—reflecting Crowle’s interest in narrative divergence, recursion, and the unresolved.
Crowle’s practice is shaped by periods of rural immersion and international studio work. His years on Galiano Island involved site-specific experimentation and pedagogical research under the mentorship of art educator Kit Grauer, while his time in Turin, Italy, and participation in a sculptural residency in Montefollonico deepened his engagement with themes of visibility, land use, and intervention. His project Waterline, realized in a disused cistern, examined the aesthetics of land revealed through historical excavation and the topographies left behind.
Crowle’s work has been presented extensively, including exhibitions at Time Space Existence (Venice), in collaboration with the design firm hcma, and during Turin Design Week. His contributions to public art and design have been recognized with multiple awards, and his work is held in collections across Canada and Europe.