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 Eye Exam Drawn Together
"Drawn Out," a new exhibition at the University of Illinois Gallery
400, examines the capability of drawing to move between artistic
mediums. Drawing as sculpture (installation), as video (animation), etc.
Newcity sat down with curator Lorelei Stewart to discuss how work in the
show illustrates the theory.
Newcity: This show's about drawing as a form that's able to
work within several different mediums. You've got slide projections, a
video. You have a video of a drum performance accompanied by a series of
drawings made by Juan William Chavez. How do these two very different
types of work connect?
Lorelei Stewart: These drawings are performative pieces that
go with the video of this drum solo by John Bonham from the song "Moby
Dick." What Juan did, he was listening to the music when he made each
of the drawings. It's set up so that the drawings and the video are
relating and there's a space of the artist between them and of course
there's no sound so we don't get to hear what he was hearing.
Newcity: Why silent?
Lorelei Stewart: It's interesting, I found out about this work
because he applied to [the gallery's] "At the Edge" series. He
proposed doing a whole installation in the gallery based on this project
in which he was going to have a video of him making this work and that
would have included the sound. I haven't spoken with him directly in
terms of what he was interested in doing by not having the sound, but I
think he's thinking about how we might imagine the sound while looking
at the video.
Newcity: The performative aspect of it?
Lorelei Stewart: The performative aspect of the drumming,
certainly, and how we fill in the sound from it.
Newcity: We'd get the sound from looking at the drawings.
Lorelei Stewart: Yeah, that gives us an idea of the sound. And
of course, there's the visual of the drumstick, which is a hand action,
the action of drawing. If I remember correctly, in his documentation he
was drawing with both hands.
Newcity: How did this whole show come together? Where'd this
idea of drawing as an expanded medium come from?
Lorelei Stewart: Actually, it came from Christa Donner, who's
made a number of sculptural-drawing paper pieces. She had one that's
kind of an "ear chandelier," where she connected the eardrum and the
mechanism of the ear to a chandelier and she had that up last year. In
the piece that she has here now, she took parts of the body--one part
might be an esophagus or digestive tract, one might be the
intestines--and it was also a corner piece like this. I just thought
what a fabulous piece, and how inventive!
Newcity: She's kind of re-imagining the body.
Lorelei Stewart: Yes. She also does zines and these kind of
graphic books that conflate something that happens to a person's body
with some kind of supernatural event. There's this one where a woman
develops a rash and then the rash gives her some superpower and she
emits light from her body. So she made that chandelier piece and I just
thought it was so fantastic and I started to think, "Well, what is that
to make drawing into sculpture?" I thought Dianna Frid's work was
similar to Christa's, she does these kind of architectural traceries.
[She made] this diorama of the Que Gardens, which are the old botanical
gardens outside of London and this is the Palm House--she does research
on her subjects--and this second piece is a representation of that
building doubled, with a palm tree inside it. But her focus of interest
is this palm tree, which supposedly--it's not actual, but supposedly--is
the oldest potted plant in the world. It was appropriated from South
Africa in 1738. She told me she asked them if it really was the oldest
potted plant and they said no, that there's a bonzai tree at the
National Arboretum in Washington that's the oldest. But she's interested
in that kind of colonial history of the tree being collected by the
English from South Africa. All that of course is behind the project. So
there's an element of taking the physical, the sculptural and
architectural, and then turning it into a flat object that then has a
sculptural presence. Aside from these two, there's John Parot, who in
his last show at Van Harrison's gallery, hung a wallpaper mural in the
front; he'd put this forest scene on the wall, then you walked in and
you saw the drawings on the landscapes. It's great that John's moving
toward drawing on images, putting up a wall mural and then drawing on
it--so these works [in the show] are in the vein of work that he's been
making, but I looked to him to start going in that direction.
Newcity: That includes these sort of photographic collage
elements?
Lorelei Stewart: Yes, along with lists of books he's been
reading, music he's been listening to. Boys he has crushes on. So with
those people as anchors, I just started going through catalogs of
artists I'd been interested in and when we did reviews for "At the
Edge" in April, a lot of the other artists in this show, such as Diane
Christiansen, who sent in all these layered drawings and a video made
from them, had submitted work. Lots of body parts, we've got some poop
coming out and it maybe turns into a breast, and a moose with its body
sagging, sort of a meditation on what happens when we get older. "Drawn Out" shows at Gallery 400, 1240 West Harrison Street,
(312)996-6114, through August 6.
Also by Michael Workman Eye Exam
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