Drawn Out

Drawing is an intimate and spontaneous medium that reflects an artist’s creative processes. It is a practice based in the material facts of gestures and surfaces and is perhaps civilisation’s oldest form of expression. John Ruskin referred to drawing “as the foundation of visual thought and an aid to engage with the past, present and future” (1)

The idea of a drawing exhibition traditionally evokes an image of a dimly lit room containing a series of line or tone renderings on paper, either presented as works in their own right or as preparatory designs for, or somehow adjunct to, sculptures or paintings. In recent decades, we have seen the broadening of the definition of drawing and an increasing independence from the term ‘work on paper’.

Over the last thirty years in Australian art, drawings have evolved onto walls, floors and onto the screen and increasingly challenge our ability to distinguish them from painting, sculpture and installation practice. A move towards large-scale work has also helped renew focus on the importance of drawing and asserted a new status for it. One might say drawings that adopt large formats have helped to move the practice into a prominent position within contemporary art. Yet, as contemporary artists continue to embrace large scale, newer technology and a concern with the materiality of alternative mediums and supports, the practice of drawing retains its sense of subtlety and fragility through its sometimes temporal existence, use of fugitive materials and economy of gesture.

Drawn Out presents the work of four artists, Peter Alwast (from Brisbane), Tim Silver (from Sydney), Laresa Kosloff and Catherine Martin (both based in Melbourne), whose work expands the dimensionality of drawing from gesture to form. The artists achieve this by incorporating processes such as casting, stop frame animation, collage and three-dimensional construction in their works.

The exhibition highlights the crusade in contemporary art practice to reinvigorate the discipline of drawing by both conventional and unconventional means. The works explore the act of drawing through playing with scale. They also emphasise the art-making itself, insisting on process and gesture and heightening the viewer’s awareness of the works’ material status. The use of materials such as Crayola crayons, chalk, digital prints and stop-frame animation assist to liberate the format of drawing from the sheet of paper, projecting it onto new surfaces and into new spaces. The object-nature of the works – their physical occupation of space – is a way of elaborating the historical relationship drawing and sculpture traditionally share.

Linked to one another by the idea that drawing is based in memory, each artwork’s content reveals the strong influence of popular culture and fantasy. The artists have adopted a combination of images and objects borrowed from comic books, science fiction movies, toy models as well as incorporating effects from the observed world to create their drawings.

This is evident in Catherine Martin’s drawing Millennium Falcon. Martin uses labyrinthine style lines to create an aerial view of a futurist possibility. Based on the Star Wars icon, the lines imply a kinetic current, where clarity and chaos are in battle. This architectural fantasy form part of a series of engineered drawings that stem from Martin’s previous investigation into enhancing the human form. The large-scale drawing has a surface area of almost three metres and is reminiscent of a plan one might find in a military command room.

Millennium Falcon is presented as a mobile construction. The drawing is based on thin timber flats and mounted on wheels that enable it to glide across the space. The hovering blue surface allows the viewer to read the work as a map or a blueprint of the Starship. The illusion of weightlessness counteracts the object-nature of the art work, allowing us to experience its form as both concrete and yet somehow immaterial.

The theme of fantasy in relation to the human body is prevalent in Kosloff’s animations. Feeling for You (a self portrait) and Themogenic Muscle Detonator (a collaborative work with Lucy Guerin Dance Company) use stop-frame animation and pop culture sound to create short narratives about the fantasy of dancing the way you want to. Influenced by music video clips, Kosloff has constructed a false reality in which animations are able to physically achieve the unachievable, in humorous, jerky compressed-time movements. Her animations have influenced the choreography of the movements by carrying the formal concerns of drawing through to dance practice; Kosloff links the improvisations and gestures that underpin both drawing and dance by emphasising the way both disciplines rely on movement of the body through space with the principal difference being that in drawing, unlike dance, marks remain behind as an after-trace.

Kosloff treats her drawings as objects as she obsessively cuts out tiny drawings ranging in scale from 1cm high, mounts them in a white void and spot lights them before recording them onto video. Reminiscent of a paper doll, the figure becomes the focus of the work. Not unlike Whiteley’s early drawing series of a figure in the bathroom, Kosloff drawings are simple in content and form; they appear to float in an empty white space.

In the performance “Themogenic Muscle Detonator” Kosloff’s intimate animation of dancer Trevor Patrick is used as a 10 metre high interactive backdrop to the performance. The video documents the impact scale has on the interaction between the animation and the performer. The performer’s bigger, better, stronger animated alter-ego not only towers over the real-life dancer but creates movements that are physically impossible in real life. By evoking repressed movement, the drawing even embodies a kind of anti-dance in one sense; it appears as if it wants to step off the screen but is constrained by the frame and by its own two-dimensionality.

Kosloff has used technology to mediate her presentation of the drawings. At the same time, her works obviously resist technological gimmickry as she strips down the drawing to a linear image and reduces movement of the animation to the barest necessity.
Peter Alwast’s series of eight drawings also embraces reproductive technology, investigating how technological tools and processes may intervene or mediate in the act of mark-making.

In Scape Alwast reinterprets his latest wall drawing installation Working like a Tiger. By rendering the three-dimensional installation as a two-dimensional reproduction, he questions the physical actuality of the object. The small drawings are a re-presentation and reworking of the large-scale constructed wall drawing installation that operates somewhere between architecture and an image. Within the bounds of the timber armature Alwast has created a reflective, translucent surface to contain his suspended highly-worked motifs.

The images, drawn from print media and television sources, are dislocated within the space.
Alwast has used the documentation of the installation to create an intimate, virtual space. He continues to fragment his work through a process of digital manipulation by reproducing images that are themselves reproductions. He retains a similar technique to that which he used to create the original wall installation, but in this instance, Alwast has reworked the imagery from his own installation – in digital, two-dimensional form – to negate the physical presence of the three-dimensional object and its situation within a specific site.

In contract, Tim Silver’s presents a series of bright orange cast Crayola crayon classic 70’s cars. Crayons melted and recast in the shape of an everyday object operate as signature works for the artist. These cars, and the skid marks they have left behind on the wall, emphasise the physical act of drawing, likening it to the bodily pleasure of fast driving.

Silver has challenged the conventions of drawing and sculpture in the creation of these drawing tools, producing objects whose instrumentality gives them an indeterminate status. Silver states “History is full of static objects and I’m interested in creating something more transient,” is how the artist describes his approach. There is an element of interaction in the work; Silver invites the curator to partake in the creation of the installation by using the cars as drawing tools and making marks with them on the wall. As a participant, one is presented with these crayon cars – objects of beauty as well as commercial icons – and faced with the challenges of not only overcoming the preciousness of the collectable car but also having to come to terms with one’s own ability to create a mark and the self-consciousness this inspires. As the cars are destined to disintegrate through the very process that animates them (driving them across the wall), they become a symbol of the fragility of beauty and the passing of time.

Renai Grace
2004

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