Horizontal Margin, Yellow, 2021
Acrylic and Enamel on Panel, 9x 12"

Five One, 2020
Enamel on Panel 14" x 18" (3)

Red Cluster, 2020
Enamel on Panel, 9" x 12" (2)

In marks repeated and piles, Jer Crowle initiates an early inquiry into repetition, order, and variation — themes that reverberate throughout his broader practice. Emerging directly after his move from Galiano Island back to Vancouver, this body of work marks a transitional period shaped by process-based observation and material sensitivity. Each painting and maquette in the series centers on a singular, graphic gesture — a forward-slash mark — repeated, inverted, or overlaid in varying compositions across linen, canvas, wood, and dimensional studies.

The work finds its origin in the artist’s time restoring and printing with a reclaimed etching press, where the repetition of a plate revealed subtle differences between impressions — the result of pressure, inking, paper, and the human hand. This series responds to those anomalies by embracing disorder within repetition. The forward-slash becomes a stand-in for language — not a legible syntax, but an indexical system: part structure, part glitch.

While the marks may appear modular or systematic, their relationships within each composition suggest slippage and multiplicity. Some works highlight a single stroke, others gather into dense, overlapping arrangements. The accompanying maquettes explore these forms in space, emphasizing gravity, collection, and precarious balance. Through these gestures, Crowle proposes a visual vocabulary where deviation becomes meaning, and where repeated forms articulate not sameness, but difference.

This body of work predates trees rivers roads and seven sisters, yet its influence runs through both — not as a linear precedent, but as an echo. In Crowle’s studio practice, ideas often unfold in parallel, with projects functioning less as chapters and more as refractive surfaces. One set of works may pursue formal logic, while another tracks a deviation; a third may offer a peripheral question that quietly restructures the original inquiry. marks repeated and piles represents one such point of emergence — a foundational node in an ongoing, interconnected investigation of form, material, and meaning.

Disposition, Repeated, 2012
Drypoint Etching, Zinc, 3 "x 4"

X, Repeated, Barnaby Killam (structure), 2010
Drypoint on cotton paper, 1" x 1" (plate)

X Black, 2019
Enamel on wood panel, 14" x 18" (2)

X, RW-C, 2019
Acrylic and Enamel on Canvas, 14" x 18"

X, R-A, 2019
Acrylic and Enamel on Canvas, 14" x 18"

X, R-AL, 2019
Acrylic and Enamel on Linen, 14" x 18"

X, RW-A, 2019
Acrylic and Enamel on Panel, 14" x 18"

Disposition, Blue, 2020
Acrylic and Enamel on Linen, 48" x 48"