Jaynie Crimmins’s Busywork turns junk mail, catalogs, and security envelopes into exquisite objects: cones, ovals, and circles arranged across the walls, the larger pieces standing alone and the smaller ones mounted on panels. The show fills Garage Art Center, a converted garage in a Bayside house, now a clean, narrow gallery. The work asks for close looking, and the room is built for it.
Crimmins’s pieces are built from a small set of gestures repeated thousands of times: rolling, sorting, stitching, folding. This is the kind of labor a culture calls busywork, work that fills time without making anything the market values, and often what women have been asked to do. Several of the works on view come from her ongoing series Equanimity, named after the Buddhist mental state she defines as “an even-minded mental state or inclination toward all experiences or objects, regardless of their origin or pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral connotations.” What gets called busywork turns out to be the labor that produces that state of mind: repetition is how you reach a kind of attention.
Transition, 2021, shredded travel and leisure catalogs, security envelopes, thread, over armature, mounted on wood, 12” x 12” x 8”D
Up close, the work resolves into a dense field of tiny rolled, pinned, and sewn pieces, arranged into patterns that fall between tapestry detail and cellular biology. The forms are organic, concentric, symmetrical, and alive: arrangements of cells that could be constellations, reading at first like microscopic life or coral or embroidery. You want to touch them. Some have velvety slopes; others bristle with tiny, prickly particles. The palette ranges from saturated blues and reds to grays with sudden spurts of color.
In Search of Beauty #11, 18” round x 2”D, 2021, Shredded travel and leisure, catalogs, security envelopes, thread over armature
Crimmins shreds the paper with a diamond-cut shredder and sorts the shreds by color. Her non-dominant right hand rolls each one; her left places it on a support with tweezers, fixed with archival adhesive. Other works are sewn, each shred folded or left raw and bound with needle and thread; loose ends hang to soften the surface, what the artist calls a “breath.” After a few seconds of looking, you notice a printed letter or the crosshatch of a security envelope buried within the pattern: the image you were sold is still there, reduced and rebuilt into something that belongs to her. There is generosity in how the work rewards close looking, and quiet humor in what it reveals: a piece of paper you would have thrown away, made into something you want to look at again.
Equanimity #7, 2022, shredded New Yorker magazine images, security, envelopes over up-cycled armature, 12″12″x 1.5″D
The work has a personal source. Crimmins has talked about her Eastern European grandparents, in whose apartment “nothing seemed to make it into the trash”: discarded clothing became crocheted rugs, old curtains became aprons. The gestures in Busywork, the rolling, folding, and stitching, are her grandmother’s kitchen and sewing-room gestures. An art-historical context runs alongside, named in her statement: the Pattern and Decoration Movement of the 1970s, which insisted that decorative and craft traditions long dismissed as women’s work belonged in the conversation. Crimmins works in that lineage. The making and the time it takes are her resistance and her resilience.
Equanimity #5, 2021, detail, shredded New Yorker magazine images, security, envelopes over up-cycled armature, 12″x12″x1.5″D
In a moment of compulsive scrolling, global instability, and climate dread, a steady mind is in short supply, and the materials Crimmins shreds are part of the apparatus that depletes it. Rebuilt into something you can look at slowly, they become a way of paying attention again. That is what the Equanimity pieces do, and what the show as a whole does. Busywork, in Crimmins’s hands, is equanimity in the making.
All photos courtesy of Etty Yaniv
Jaynie Crimmins: Busywork at Garage Art Center 26-01 Corporal Kennedy Street
Bayside, NY 11360 runs through May 31st, 2026
About the writer: Etty Yaniv is a Brooklyn-based artist, writer, curator, and founder of Art Spiel. She works in installation, painting, and mixed media, and has shown her art in exhibitions across the United States and abroad. Since 2018 she has published interviews and reviews through Art Spiel, often focusing on underrecognized voices and smaller venues. More about her art can be found at ettyyanivstudio.com and on Instagram @etty.yaniv