unDRAWN, at the Brewery Project, Los Angeles
Ismael de Anda, Spencer Chow, Kirsten Cole, Caryl Davis, David Frackman,
Marcy Freedman, Alexandra A. Grant, John Mills, Nellie King Solomon,
Carrie Ungerman
An exhibition of unusual approaches to drawing organized by Alexandra A.
Grant
DATES: November 16 – December 21, 2002
AT THE BREWERY PROJECT
626 South Avenue 21 #33
Los Angeles, CA 90031
(323) 222-0222
HOURS: Friday – Sunday, 12 – 5pm
Currently on view at the Brewery Project in downtown Los Angeles is an
exhibition called unDRAWN, “unusual approaches to drawing.” Organized
by Los Angeles-based artist Alexandra Grant, the show seeks to engage
renewed critical interest in drawing and ask the viewer to entertain the
question of what a drawing can be.
Grant has brought together eleven young and emerging artists who use
drawing as a concept on which they base their work in other media. The
artworks selected for unDRAWN - none of which are actual works on paper
- range from painting to site-specific installation. Viewing them, one gets
the sense that drawing, in this exhibition, is seen as a verb and not a noun.
Drawing, as a verb, can be observing, mark-making, delineating, setting
boundaries, gesturing, abstracting, and pulling out, in media as diverse as
wire, sugary syrup, iron-oxide pigment and recorded telephone
conversations.
What makes the Brewery Project such an unusual space for exhibition is that
under the guidelines set by Director John O'Brien, artists who organize shows
must include their own work in the exhibitions. Though it is normally taboo
for a curator to 'curate themselves' into a show, at the Brewery Project it
seems to create a community of like-minded artists. Grant has gathered
around her a group whose mutual intellectual interests lie in their conceptual
approaches to drawing.
Grant's own work is part of a series she calls "drawings without paper,"
wire sculptures based on found text and poetry that delicately dance across
the surface of the gallery wall, casting a shadow behind them. In untitled
(after Wislawa Szymborska), Grant uses the text of the Polish poet's
"Possibilities" as the structure for her piece, twisting the words to the poem in
wire 'word bubbles' and then interconnecting them. Each line of
"Possibilities" begins with the words, "I prefer..." and Grant uses these as
nuclei for the mapping of the poem. Grant creates an optical illusion by
tracing, in pencil, the shadow her sculpture casts directly on the wall. The
effect is startling: the viewer has to discern the different weights of line
between wire, shadow, and pencil.
Alexandra Grant, detail, untitled (after Wislawa Szymborska)
Sharing the back room of the Brewery Project is the playful work of David
Frackman, spirobots. Made out of legos, Frackman's robots sputter and jerk
across the surface of a raised platform, drawing patterns of varying
complexity in magic marker. A programmer and instructor at Parson's in
New York, Frackman based the patterns the spirobots trace on different
algorithms. One robot spirals out a pattern that resembles a circular saw
blade, while the other obsessively delineates what could be the plans of a
Neolithic village. In contrast to the handiwork of Grant's piece, spirobots
remove the human hand from the manufacture of a drawing. But even in the
complexity of the patterns and the quality of the marks made, the robots
echo the idiosyncrasies of 'hand-made' drawings.
David Frackman, spirobots
In the main gallery of the Brewery Project hangs Nellie King Solomon's is,
too, a large-scale painting on a translucent plastic called Mylar. Pooling
and slippery pigment appears to pour out from the wall in bright, luscious,
out-sized drips. The effect is reminiscent of blood, but far too appealing to
sustain that illusion for long. Solomon's process involves using custom made
tools to print and pool her paints and pigments, while the drips are formed
by gravity. The result is that the paint appears to hang in space, almost
beyond the wall. As an unusual approach to drawing, Solomon's work
brings into question ideas of scale (the Mylar appears to be an enormous
sheet of paper). The absence of marks by hand or brush make one consider
how the artist has manipulated her material.
work by (clockwise): Nellie King Solomon, Kirsten Cole, Marcy Freedman,
Spencer Chow, and Carrie Ungerman
In dissect (bees), Kirsten Cole, a volunteer bee-keeper at Wave Hill in the
Bronx, New York, has created a series of drawings of bees in black
dissecting boxes. Each bee is drawn in an outline of pin pricks, a few
entomology pins left tantalizingly in place. Drippin' Goopy Red and Sun
Ray Curve, Marcy Freedman's work, are lush photographs of landscapes
she creates out of sugar. Using syrup made out of confectioner's sugar,
water and food color, Freedman "draws" in space with the hot liquid as it
quickly cools into crystalline and colorful forms. (Freedman's secondary, and
ongoing, project in the show is a "DrawingInResidence," a day-long urban
artist residency that she has run out of her apartment and in other group
shows. Freedman invited Liz Harvey to do a one-day residency for
unDRAWN. Harvey spent a day sewing a work called joyrides, which maps
various paths taken over the years to the Brewery Project.) Carrie
Ungerman's gesture, a floor sculpture made of wire wrapped with black
tape, is similar to Freedman's approach in that it also uses material to trace
the gesture of the hand drawing in space.
Spencer Chow, glider
The work of Spencer Chow, graphic designer and digital artist, is intriguing
when considered as a drawing. Chow's glider is an image based on a
single, horizontal line of pixels that is downloaded easily on the web
because the html repeats the line infinitely. (Chow's website is www.rotovibe.
com). Chow's work suggests a different approach to line through digital
design. Can a drawing be a line of digitized information repeated
infinitely? The print included in this show is a Chomira print: a digital image
printed on photographic paper. The quality of the print is very precise and
without pixilation; it takes a moment to ascertain that the bands of color are
not a painting.
John Mills, looseleaf, looseleaf 2, fx, fx2, fx3, stump
John Mills, a Los Angeles-based painter makes work that is primarily about
drawing, while firmly rooted in a tradition of oil painting on linen. Mills'
paintings are of objects separated from their outline, creating images that
lie somewhere between abstraction and representation. Mills writes in his
artist statement that "there is a point in a painting where something that is
represented can become just pure physical paint, and vice versa."
Caryl Davis, "I" Beam Stance
Caryl Davis's most recent project, at the Schindler House in West Los
Angeles, used the relationship between her body and the architecture as the
basis for a sculpture made of mud. For unDRAWN, Davis used a similar
approach, copying the stance of the Brewery Project's retrofitted support
structure with her body. She traced the space framed and bounded
between her legs onto the wall, and filled this 'negative' space with fine iron-
oxide pigment. Davis writes that "drawing, and especially its ability to
delineate what's not seen, is often the point of departure for this work."
Davis was awarded a Durfee Foundation Grant for the purposes of
completing "I" Beam Stance.
What is not seen is the basis for the work of video-artist Ismael De Anda.
Interested in doing art work both about telepathy and portraits of unusual
individuals, De Anda's project was to do a collective portrait of all the
artists in unDRAWN. Teleportraiture is a video journal of how De Anda
imagined each artist's work based on individual telephone conversations.
De Anda matched appropriate images to selections from the conversations
(which he recorded). One of the most successful pairings is Caryl Davis's
description of her childhood, as she describes being the "mud queen," and
images of hands moving around in a vat of what appears to be fine clay.
De Anda's approach to drawing was in many ways to "draw out" the other
artists.
Ismael de Anda, Teleportraiture
Ismael de Anda, Spencer Chow, Kirsten Cole, Caryl Davis, David Frackman,
Marcy Freedman, Alexandra A. Grant, John Mills, Nellie King Solomon,
Carrie Ungerman
An exhibition of unusual approaches to drawing organized by Alexandra A.
Grant
DATES: November 16 – December 21, 2002
AT THE BREWERY PROJECT
626 South Avenue 21 #33
Los Angeles, CA 90031
(323) 222-0222
HOURS: Friday – Sunday, 12 – 5pm
Currently on view at the Brewery Project in downtown Los Angeles is an
exhibition called unDRAWN, “unusual approaches to drawing.” Organized
by Los Angeles-based artist Alexandra Grant, the show seeks to engage
renewed critical interest in drawing and ask the viewer to entertain the
question of what a drawing can be.
Grant has brought together eleven young and emerging artists who use
drawing as a concept on which they base their work in other media. The
artworks selected for unDRAWN - none of which are actual works on paper
- range from painting to site-specific installation. Viewing them, one gets
the sense that drawing, in this exhibition, is seen as a verb and not a noun.
Drawing, as a verb, can be observing, mark-making, delineating, setting
boundaries, gesturing, abstracting, and pulling out, in media as diverse as
wire, sugary syrup, iron-oxide pigment and recorded telephone
conversations.
What makes the Brewery Project such an unusual space for exhibition is that
under the guidelines set by Director John O'Brien, artists who organize shows
must include their own work in the exhibitions. Though it is normally taboo
for a curator to 'curate themselves' into a show, at the Brewery Project it
seems to create a community of like-minded artists. Grant has gathered
around her a group whose mutual intellectual interests lie in their conceptual
approaches to drawing.
Grant's own work is part of a series she calls "drawings without paper,"
wire sculptures based on found text and poetry that delicately dance across
the surface of the gallery wall, casting a shadow behind them. In untitled
(after Wislawa Szymborska), Grant uses the text of the Polish poet's
"Possibilities" as the structure for her piece, twisting the words to the poem in
wire 'word bubbles' and then interconnecting them. Each line of
"Possibilities" begins with the words, "I prefer..." and Grant uses these as
nuclei for the mapping of the poem. Grant creates an optical illusion by
tracing, in pencil, the shadow her sculpture casts directly on the wall. The
effect is startling: the viewer has to discern the different weights of line
between wire, shadow, and pencil.
Alexandra Grant, detail, untitled (after Wislawa Szymborska)
Sharing the back room of the Brewery Project is the playful work of David
Frackman, spirobots. Made out of legos, Frackman's robots sputter and jerk
across the surface of a raised platform, drawing patterns of varying
complexity in magic marker. A programmer and instructor at Parson's in
New York, Frackman based the patterns the spirobots trace on different
algorithms. One robot spirals out a pattern that resembles a circular saw
blade, while the other obsessively delineates what could be the plans of a
Neolithic village. In contrast to the handiwork of Grant's piece, spirobots
remove the human hand from the manufacture of a drawing. But even in the
complexity of the patterns and the quality of the marks made, the robots
echo the idiosyncrasies of 'hand-made' drawings.
David Frackman, spirobots
In the main gallery of the Brewery Project hangs Nellie King Solomon's is,
too, a large-scale painting on a translucent plastic called Mylar. Pooling
and slippery pigment appears to pour out from the wall in bright, luscious,
out-sized drips. The effect is reminiscent of blood, but far too appealing to
sustain that illusion for long. Solomon's process involves using custom made
tools to print and pool her paints and pigments, while the drips are formed
by gravity. The result is that the paint appears to hang in space, almost
beyond the wall. As an unusual approach to drawing, Solomon's work
brings into question ideas of scale (the Mylar appears to be an enormous
sheet of paper). The absence of marks by hand or brush make one consider
how the artist has manipulated her material.
work by (clockwise): Nellie King Solomon, Kirsten Cole, Marcy Freedman,
Spencer Chow, and Carrie Ungerman
In dissect (bees), Kirsten Cole, a volunteer bee-keeper at Wave Hill in the
Bronx, New York, has created a series of drawings of bees in black
dissecting boxes. Each bee is drawn in an outline of pin pricks, a few
entomology pins left tantalizingly in place. Drippin' Goopy Red and Sun
Ray Curve, Marcy Freedman's work, are lush photographs of landscapes
she creates out of sugar. Using syrup made out of confectioner's sugar,
water and food color, Freedman "draws" in space with the hot liquid as it
quickly cools into crystalline and colorful forms. (Freedman's secondary, and
ongoing, project in the show is a "DrawingInResidence," a day-long urban
artist residency that she has run out of her apartment and in other group
shows. Freedman invited Liz Harvey to do a one-day residency for
unDRAWN. Harvey spent a day sewing a work called joyrides, which maps
various paths taken over the years to the Brewery Project.) Carrie
Ungerman's gesture, a floor sculpture made of wire wrapped with black
tape, is similar to Freedman's approach in that it also uses material to trace
the gesture of the hand drawing in space.
Spencer Chow, glider
The work of Spencer Chow, graphic designer and digital artist, is intriguing
when considered as a drawing. Chow's glider is an image based on a
single, horizontal line of pixels that is downloaded easily on the web
because the html repeats the line infinitely. (Chow's website is www.rotovibe.
com). Chow's work suggests a different approach to line through digital
design. Can a drawing be a line of digitized information repeated
infinitely? The print included in this show is a Chomira print: a digital image
printed on photographic paper. The quality of the print is very precise and
without pixilation; it takes a moment to ascertain that the bands of color are
not a painting.
John Mills, looseleaf, looseleaf 2, fx, fx2, fx3, stump
John Mills, a Los Angeles-based painter makes work that is primarily about
drawing, while firmly rooted in a tradition of oil painting on linen. Mills'
paintings are of objects separated from their outline, creating images that
lie somewhere between abstraction and representation. Mills writes in his
artist statement that "there is a point in a painting where something that is
represented can become just pure physical paint, and vice versa."
Caryl Davis, "I" Beam Stance
Caryl Davis's most recent project, at the Schindler House in West Los
Angeles, used the relationship between her body and the architecture as the
basis for a sculpture made of mud. For unDRAWN, Davis used a similar
approach, copying the stance of the Brewery Project's retrofitted support
structure with her body. She traced the space framed and bounded
between her legs onto the wall, and filled this 'negative' space with fine iron-
oxide pigment. Davis writes that "drawing, and especially its ability to
delineate what's not seen, is often the point of departure for this work."
Davis was awarded a Durfee Foundation Grant for the purposes of
completing "I" Beam Stance.
What is not seen is the basis for the work of video-artist Ismael De Anda.
Interested in doing art work both about telepathy and portraits of unusual
individuals, De Anda's project was to do a collective portrait of all the
artists in unDRAWN. Teleportraiture is a video journal of how De Anda
imagined each artist's work based on individual telephone conversations.
De Anda matched appropriate images to selections from the conversations
(which he recorded). One of the most successful pairings is Caryl Davis's
description of her childhood, as she describes being the "mud queen," and
images of hands moving around in a vat of what appears to be fine clay.
De Anda's approach to drawing was in many ways to "draw out" the other
artists.
Ismael de Anda, Teleportraiture
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