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this is a messy little piece of poetic ruminations about drawing

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hoping it acts as some sort of introduction with words to a rather quiet project :)

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        My current art practice has dialed back quite far from previous explorations with installation and performance video. It has become very focused on drawing and its ability to act as a container or colander for so much. There are questions of economy of mark, subtlety and completeness.

 

edit *The holes punched in the sieve are hold in your hand cookie cutter shapes. Defined by what is let go. How to get all the seeds out of a tomato - the threshing floor. 

 

        I have been working with ink and customizing brushes to optimize some kind of endless flow of attention.

 

     Line and the properties of the negative space of the page continue to evoke consistent touch and modes of subjectivity formed by peripheral behaviors and blind spots.  The works are made with reproduction in mind by printer or photo copier or self or friend or foe and elide their own sense of uniqueness through some kind of drifting anthropomorphism that deals with intention.

 

      Modes of representation offer avenues to funnel and compress some vast poetic experience into a small packet of information.  And in this way the point at the end of a brush or pen offers a finite end to deal with this origami like accordion folding and unfolding.  I try to push the drawings to be self witnessing events.

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       The capillary action and air/ ink exchange of pen brush devices are seductive traits I associate with writing and text and always bring to my mind early cuneiform artifacts, where I can imagine text’s early tools of reproduction rolled out on some field of negative space.  Rollerballed cuneiforms. I often think about the way a single letter face can sit up on the page packing such a big punch when it is simply constructed from a type of legibility and a combinatorial/contextual sense of place. A letter gets used and repeated and thrown around from one word to another always having to keep up and I think of marks and lines in the same way. The alphabet soup of a physics problem.

 

edit* How many bushels of lavender, to smoke out and distil a teaspoon of scent, how many grape vines to make a single glass of wine. Sometimes I focus on  and imagine the volume of ink to draw a line from here to there. 

 

     Then of course there is the problem of representation - many of the drawings are of animals and plants and the question of these subjects as a foil or stand in or straw man is a question that I let sit in the work. Their representation seems necessary and I am happy to introduce some level of hypocrisy in my work flow because honestly the forms the ink take riddle me. Maybe representation dovetails with indulgence; pastries and things. Cultural frills of sustenance. Sometimes I just ask - Why can I draw an animal? Why is an animal able to draw a picture? And in a way I guess this iconography allows the pages to be just drawings of something, or possibly Trojan horses that can ride out a seemingly roped and constricted course of only ink and paper.

 

        Finally, caught up in this personified mark making is some meeting ground where the nostalgia and innocence around a memory of Etruscans singing songs meets the Romans coming clanging to lay claim.