southwestNET: drawing outside the lines
SMoCA

First, some assumptions:

Architectural drawings, under-paintings, sketches-

Like notes for writing, drawings are preliminary work, letters that artists write to themselves. Pencil on paper, scraps of the moments left behind or buried in the rush to make a painting, or sculpture, or building. Plans, not results.

Drawing water, quick on the draw-

Drawing is movement, and famously, the movement of the body
in the world. Drawing is action. Action has consequences.

Drawing is process, certainly. Sometimes random when the marks are looked at, often to the maker when being done--but with intention. Drawing is searching.

The drawing room--a place to get to know each other.

Unlike the sheets in the gallery flat file that accompany the painting show, or the folio of ink or pencil studies that record random thoughts and design notions, these drawings are not so much traces of process as pieces about process, and the process addressed is not uniquely the making of artwork, but the making of all that stuff we call “the world,” and our personal and social possibilities of perceiving it.

Walking into the SMoCA gallery housing this exhibit, a quick look shows objects
throughout the room on walls, hanging from the ceiling and squatting on the floor.
Very much the mélange of the contemporary, tasteful black and white counterpoised by splashes of bold but restrained color, the display at first glance would seem to make a good film set for a scene in an art museum. Move closer, and the institutional impersonal becomes sometimes too intimate.

Covering a long wall is a huge expanse of graphite, gray and shiny, with an identifiable drawing in some traditional sense in roughly the middle--a car crash
with vortices converging on the front grill. Edgar Arceneaux has mined his memory for his “Intersection” works since witnessing a horrific car crash. As monumental as the instant it depicts, this work is appropriately located deep in the gallery.

Angela Ellsworth has long mixed performance with traditional mark making, and is exceptional for both her mastery of two-dimensional form and her almost terrifying personalization of her world. Three pieces mark the steps from her studio to a person she misses. The public meditation on her own very finite life
is only made bearable by the execution of acutely balanced design.

In contrast to these testaments is Jen Urso’s collection of pen and ink drawings about environmental processes and degradation. Placing a tower of ice bricks on her drawing, she has let the ice melt leaving swirls of flowed color
and perturbed line in metaphor of the loss to the eco system caused by global warming. Next to the intimate works, these seem like PC propaganda--the contrast between the immense time put into realizing her process works
rubs uncomfortably with the obsessive line drawings that stand in for the natural world.

Mediating the distance between the programmatic and almost confessional works are experiments with manipulated orthography by Matthew Sontheimer.
Taking his father’s autograph as the source, Sontheimer has created a 26-letter alphabet derived from the squiggles in the signature. Silk-screened over two walls; the flowing pattern resembles a readout from medical monitors or a frieze
in Eastern script. The opacity of undecipherable text affirms a barrier between the artist and the viewer that is refreshingly modest.

Chris Sauter’s slicing of a museum wall to create drywall maquettes of bleachers appears to evade both past personal experience and political certitudes until one notices that the bleacher-like piles seem to be in diminished scale. Made from the very real and apparently full-sized wall, the composite of bleachers and aerated wall questions the reality and scale of the museum itself, and pokes holes in our own façade of urbane culturati.

Other artists participating are Deborah Salac, Martin Soto, Karen Kimmel, Adrian Pecora and Steven Yazzie. The disparate projects of the individual artists seen in ensemble do not announce another revolution against the art object as commodity, or on the other hand, quietly insist that aesthetic discovery is solely
the provenance of art institutions. Drawing outside the lines does, however, affirm the tradition of individual artists seeking to move outside of their own
conceptions of the commonplace world to draw out the truth.

-Scott Andrews

southwestNET: drawing outside the lines
On view to September 16, 2007
Gerard L. Cafesjian Founder's Gallery
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art
7374 East Second Street
Scottsdale , AZ 85251
Tel.: 480-994-ARTS
Website: www.smoca.org