Etch A Sketch: The drawing show features work by seven artists who make drawings not as a prelude or a preliminary step to a painting or sculpture but as their primary artistic output.
Drawing is perhaps the most direct form of visual artistic expression. These is something about a line that seems to move directly from the artists hand to the paper- the work does not get distracted by color or brush stroke. The systematic way that the artists in this show produce work is intellectually captivating and visually mesmerizing. Often visibly laborious the drawings in this show lay bare the artists’ facility and skill.
Adam Fowler’s process oriented drawings materialize from divergent practices. He begins by making sweeping automatic drawings. Once the marks are laid down Fowler cuts along the arcing lines with a blade removing the unmarked space. The web like drawings are stacked on top of one another resulting in a sculptural physicality.
Michiyo Ihara makes intricate graphite drawings on an intimate scale. The work has a symbolic devotional quality. The round mandala like drawings incorporate tiny animals and symbols. Ihara received her formal arts training in Japan.
Katherine Jackson etches text and scratchy lines into glass panels and illuminated her three dimensional drawings with led lights. The drawings have a systematic almost scientific feeling. Ironically, the diagramming and uneasy lines leave the viewer with more questions than answers.
Lucas Monaco has been concentrating on drawing since 1997 when he put his paintings aside. His drawings evolved into maps and Monaco began exploring the differences between “looking at” and “reading”. These map like drawings of arial views have the sure hard of a cartographer and yet remain ambiguous and metaphorical.
Linn Meyer’s process of making drawings is a focused system of mark making. The slow deliberation of her line is linked to her breath – in this way the immediacy and directness of the intention and the mark are evident. Her mylar and ink drawings exist in the physical plane but allude to what we cannot see or touch.
Mia Pearlman’s cloudscape drawings are glazes of graphite slowly built up and drawn into with a blending stump and edited with erasure. The clouds teeter on the brink of nonexistence, substantive yet physically insubstantial.
Katia Santibanez’s work is an investigation into the relationship between nature, architecture and the mind. The process oriented mark making evokes natural form such as grass or seaweed. The organic marks defined my formal geometry the work is at once restrained and ebullient. The artist has been showing with the gallery since 2001
