Curated by Lauren Cornell

When I think of a “surveyor,” I think of that guy (yeah, humph, usually a guy) in a utility suit with a mysterious tripod, taking the measurements of the terrain and marking it with chalk and sticks. That’s not unlike my conception of Leidy Churchman, whose early videos feature exactly such tools, and whose entire project could be described as a kind of survey of the world, and as a culling, sampling, rearranging, and remaking of its signs and systems. This summer, American viewers will have their first opportunity to survey Churchman’s enchanted and estranged artifactual universe in a show titled “Crocodile” at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College. The exhibition will include more than sixty oil paintings from 2010 to the present, the 2011 video Snakes, and a newly commissioned floor painting, and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue copublished by CCS Bard and Dancing Foxes Press.

— Amy Sillman