artist, Los Angeles interview by AARON ROSE photography by DANIEL TRESE The Los Angeles artist Rosson Crow’s large-scale paintings emit a startling combination of gaudy decoration and underground sleaze. Her work is celebrated for its exuberant depictions of nostalgialaden interiors that blend historical allusion and theatrical illusion. The work also stands out for its hallucinogenic spaces, with interiors fracturing and distorting from realistic representation into abstraction and surrealism, and “teetering,” as she puts it, “between claustrophobic and agoraphobic.” AARON ROSE — There is something very theatrical about your paintings. They almost feel like empty sets. Do you have any background in theater? ROSSON CROW — I studied it a little, but never heavily. For a while, when I was thinking about graduate school, there was a moment when I was trying to decide whether to go into painting, acting, or film. I had also done some video art, which wasn’t very filmic, but I was acting in them. In retrospect, they were horrible! I wouldn’t show them now, but those things were always part of my work. The paintings feel more theatrical: They got bigger, and the larger the canvas was, the…