**LOGAN CROMPTON**
Bio
Logan Crompton [b. 2000, Kansas City, MO] is a Black post internet artist based in Philadelphia, PA. Logan, as an artist, is concerned with Black corporeal realities, transparency, reflectivity, and protection within digital spaces. Their work explores said themes through mythmaking, magic, matrixes, algorithms, and repetition as mantra. Logan received their BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in Painting and Art History before pursuing their MFA at Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Logan was previously a Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art and an AXA art prize finalist. They currently work as the Loretta C. Duckworth Makerspace’s Graduate Assistant at Charles Library and as a Teacher at Coco Academy in South Philly. Logan has shown work in Kansas City, Philadelphia, and New York.
Artist Statement
What are the consequences of an idea, image or meme being proliferated with no seeming end?
My work takes on the uncanny and voyeuristic elements of the black figure which relates both to social media and painting history. The placing of these works and the images they reappropriate have me working between interior and exterior worlds: a home, an empty lot, what we wear, what we put online and what that reflects about us as individuals. I have become increasingly focused on fashion, fabric, and cloth. These elements stand out for their historical significance as early technologies and their potential as a versatile framework for expression. The use of sequins superficially, typically associated with club culture, materially is transformed into a reflective exterior, protective, illuminated, and reminiscent of chainmail. The fabrics I used and referenced in the work are byproducts of the fast fashion industry. They are transformed by the flattening, scaling up, and shifting of their original context through technology interventions such as Photoshop, printer malfunctions, and image transfer. The pieces I make are constrained to aspect ratios of (2: 3, 4: 4,16: 9) which is common for smartphones, flatscreen TVs, printer paper, etc.
The matrixes of a material's inherent grid organize new and additional information. Process becomes indistinguishable from finished work: the matrix and its print become one in the same. I think of the matrix as the underlying structure that can be found in memes, and in combining elements such as text, image, sequins, grids, and tape, I privilege process as an entry point into the complex nature of memes structurally. Manipulating grids reveals their capacity to store and embed information. By working with multiples, I complicate information organization, making the work self-referential and interconnected, mirroring online information structures. I explore trends and virality through the self-referential nature of the grid and the matrix, where elements of a work's source are embedded in its making and reflected in its matrix. Iconography is embedded in these complex structures; and they continue to be appropriated.
The presence of the black figure is abstracted not only through my hand or use of technology such as printing, photoshop, or image transfer but also by way of carrying the history / digital legacy of the many manipulations it went through before it appears in my work. My work draws comparison between the virality of images on social media and the fast fashion industry, both of which operate in cycles.
My concern with the matrix is a response to trends and virality as it relates to repetition, mutation, and imitation. Compressing and flattening visual information challenges traditional painting's illusory depth. By disrupting conventional techniques, this approach defies how paintings typically transport audiences into imagined worlds. Instead, it creates a complex "third space" through dense, multilayered information embeddings that strategically subvert and reimagine artistic mythmaking. The work is a provocative, defiant reimagining of spatial perception, where compression itself becomes an artistic intervention.
**PROJECTS*
Healing is a process not a destination: MFA Thesis Exhbition , Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Philadelphia, PA 2025
CHOPPED X SCREWED: Online Black Net Art Symposium, with collaborators Dante Moore and Shori Sims, 2025
**MANIFESTATIONS**
HEALING IS A PROCESS NOT A DESTINATION//Sublimation matrix//2024
HEALING IS A PROCESS NOT A DESTINATION//Sequin print//2024
EVRTHNGUVEVRWNTEDISALRDYWT
iwasmeantforthebigscreen//2min//2023
ZOMBIEBABE//instagram filter//2023
BLACK MEME BOOK CLUB//SHORI (HAILEY) SIMS, DANTE MOORE, LOGAN CROMPTON//2025
AVATARS//7min23//2023
INSPO??
RESEARCH//READINGS
