Jay Critchley is a national treasure.
A uniquely original activist and conceptual artist based in Provincetown whose work embodies the rebellious social conscience of the 1960s, Critchley is always voiced with irony and sly wit.
He’s adopted an ecological conscience aware of the interconnectedness of all beings on the planet, asking what is our relationship to the land and how does that define us? To that end he skewers the dominant culture’s colonialism and corporatism, critiquing our often-carnivorous versions of alleged patriotism and democracy with his various media.
His interdisciplinary work, seen around the globe, includes performance, wearable art, sculpture, installations and architecture, using what he calls, “the materiality of place, the vernacular of the land” — what he finds from the land and sea of his Provincetown home base and elsewhere, such as, “peat, fish skins, feathers, water, motor oil, Christmas trees and gathered plastic tampon applicators.” He made a tampon dress to pose as Miss Tampon Liberty in campaigning to ban them from landfills and ocean environments, and as keynote speaker at a conference in Scotland on Menstruation and Sustainability. Indeed, he became a “born-again artist” at 33 in the 1980s, using sand, old automobiles sandblasted with sand, filled with sand and likenesses of Ronald Reagan’s family, while learning about art by interviewing artists on WOMR-FM, Provincetown’s community radio station.