Jerstin Crosby
Good Citizen
For Jerstin Crosby’s first exhibition in Saint Louis, “In the Manner of Smoke,” he plastered the gallery’s full-size, outdoor billboard with an image of two men, their faces covered by bandannas, displaying a spray-painted banner that reads YOU CANNOT CONTROL WHAT IS WILD. The work alludes simultaneously to a 2001 arson action by the Earth Liberation Front, in which that slogan was found spray-painted amid the burned remains of a poplar farm, and to Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, in which the titular proto-ecoterrorists burn, among other things, dozens of commercial billboards.