An interview with 2025 Artist Resident Rob Croll ahead of his group show opening on September 4, 2026 at Chicago Artists Coalition. This spotlight series aims to serve as an intimate introduction to our residents and their work through a Q&A-style interview. Interview originally conducted on May 19, 2026 by Dana Randall, Communications and Alumni Relations Manager at Chicago Artists Coalition.
Q: Do you have any common themes running through your most recent works in progress?
A: It’s hard to see all of the connections without the benefit of distance, but lately I’ve been making a lot of work that thinks about digital life through analog means. I’ve been processing the amount of digital media and information I consume, and that almost everyone around me consumes, but I’m responding to this situation by translating it into physical form, material form. So my work never really uses the grammar of digital media but still addresses it in its own way.
I like to borrow the idea of extended technique from music—it’s when you use an instrument in a way that wasn’t intended, like when you treat a stringed instrument as a percussion instrument to create another texture. I tend to approach all technology in that way; with photography, I try to find counterintuitive ways to use the camera. I mix up the techniques of still photography and video and see what images can come out of the misuse of the technology.
Q: How has your work evolved since being in the CAC residency?
A: I’ve spent a lot of the time unpacking the things I learned in grad school, figuring out what to hold onto, what to let go of, what to reinterpret. For better or worse, I think a lot of my work comes out of that time and its collision of incompatible desires.
Over the past year, I’ve started to feel a bit more free to play around with materials before necessarily knowing what the outcome will be, and I’ve started to allow more humor to enter my work. It may be because I started teaching for the first time last year as well, and that’s had a lot of influence on how I frame ideas.
In some ways I’ve shifted towards social practice, thinking about the effects my work could produce in my community and the actions that can attach to my work outside the objects themselves. I’ve also changed in the way I think about site-specificity, as I’ve had more opportunities to respond to specific architecture around Chicago. It’s exciting to see how the work can talk to the space it’s in.
Q: What are some of your biggest artistic influences? Where do you find inspiration?
A: I think the artist Robert Gober once answered this question so perfectly that I need to quote him. He said: “Whenever I give a talk about my work I am invariably asked who my influences are. Not what my influences are, but who. As if the gutter, misunderstandings, memories, sex, dreams, and books matter less than the forebears do. After all, in terms of influences, it is as much the guy who mugged me on 10th Street, or my beloved dog who passed away much too early, as it was Giotto or Diane Arbus.”
I love this answer—there are so many things in life that are just as influential as any artist you might study. As it happens I’m not particularly influenced by Giotto or Diane Arbus, but for me Gober’s name could replace one of theirs in the quote.
I have this attitude that’s closely tied to the way I think about teaching. It has to do with finding ways to be influenced by things you don’t like just as much as things you like. I want to reach a point where I’m inspired by everything I see, just through close attention, close reading.
On a broad level, my most constant influence is light. I’m always looking at how the light interacts with things, especially when it seems particular to a certain place. In the studios here at CAC, I like to come late at night, when there’s no one else in the building and the gallery lights are off, just see how a different light affects the space. The streetlights send shadows of trees onto the walls.
As far as artists go, I love people like Martin Puryear, where craft and concept are totally entangled. For a while one of my biggest influences was Letha Wilson because of the way she moved photography towards sculpture; I think that’s the direction I’m headed in as well. But also so many artists from the past. I think about Käthe Kollwitz’s portraits all the time, though I’m almost constitutionally opposed to having people in my work. And there’s this 15th-century woodcarver, Tilman Riemenschneider, whose work I love despite having basically no connection to its religious content.
Q: Tell me about your favorite mediums. What about them speaks to you?
A: Actually, thinking of Riemenschneider, I love relief sculpture, though it’s not something I’ve ever worked with myself. I love how it can use the techniques of drawing to represent three-dimensional space while still behaving as a three-dimensional object, so there’s this tension or contradiction between the actual surface and the space it conveys.
As far as doing the activity myself, I can really get lost in photography. I’ll often start with a destination in mind, a site or subject I want to photograph, but on the way there it’ll take me like an hour to walk two blocks because the presence of the camera conditions me to notice things in a different way. I’ll end up with a dozen unexpected images and maybe not the one I set out to make.
Photographs are also interesting to me because they’re so open to misinterpretation, and it’s so easy to confuse the image of an object with the object itself. I think there’s a potential to use photographic images in a critical way because of their ability to draw you in with accuracy and recognition while remaining inconclusive.
Q: Do you have a favorite time of day to create? How does the time you find or choose to make influence your practice?
A: Night is probably my favorite time. But it changes. I have different practices associated with different times of the year. With photography, for example, depending on where you live, there are certain kinds of images that are only possible in summer or fall, or in certain atmospheric conditions. And Chicago changes from day to day. Something exciting happens when a particular quality of light starts to come around again. I want there to be an ecology in the way I work; I want my work to attend to the conditions around it.
For a long time, I’ve felt as if I have two separate practices, one for day and one for night. There are kinds of photography, like long exposure, that lend themselves to night, and I’d also say that I think more abstractly in the dark.
Q: In keeping with our values, one thing we want to do is cultivate a community of knowledge-sharing. What is something you would encourage other artists to learn about? What is something that made a difference in your career?
A: I think hospitality has become an important part of my work, and one I didn’t think of as being so important until recently. You can act as a host in many ways, whether literally in terms of how you organize events or welcome people to a show, or more abstractly in the work itself. A question that’s sometimes overlooked is how our work can be welcoming, both when we’re there with it and when we’re not.
I would add that saying no to things is a skill I’ve recognized as important only recently. Sometimes you feel a certain pressure to say yes to every possible opportunity. But spending more time on decisions about what to generate, where to focus energy, is one of the most important things you can do to maintain the integrity of your work and be able to devote enough time to the things that really matter.
Q: Do you have a personal philosophy relating to your practice or your life?
A: Too many. First, I would say that it’s more important to be a person than an artist. When I teach, I tend to start with that as the one ground rule. I think if you spend all of your time focusing on your practice and the administration of your practice, you can lose track of the things that actually feed it on a deeper level. It’s important to work on being a person and to follow interests that might not help your work in obvious or transactional ways. You have to figure out what you care about and follow that, and then it will feed back into your work organically, probably in less literal or superficial forms.
Q: Is there anything else you’d like to share?
A: One thing I should mention is that I worked as a literary translator for several years before I went back to school for art, and I think that background totally informs my way of thinking. It helped me let go of an illusory idea of originality, or complete originality, and opened up the possibility of creative response in a way that’s become crucial for my work. It’s helpful for teaching too: if you approach someone’s work with the mindset of a translator, you start off by describing and interpreting it, trying to figure out what it is and what makes it what it is. You convey your experience of the work rather than an initial judgment.
Going back to my philosophy, I’d say that becoming more aware of the limits of your own experience is very important to me as an ongoing project. I think moments of stepping outside our own perspective, getting in our own way, even experiencing alienation, are essential experiences that should inform what we do.
Website: rmcroll.com
Instagram: N/A
You can view Rob’s work at his group show opening on Friday, September 4, 2026 from 5–8pm at Chicago Artists Coalition alongside Sebastian Bruno-Harris, Nick D’Alessandro and Van Payne, curated by Taj Richardson.