DRAWING ZERO 1
Features works produced with hand tools that are subtly influenced by digital aesthetics. The artists all display a mastery of classical drawing techniques, imbued with sensibilities affected by an increasingly virtual environment.
¤Barb Bondy
The Forming, graphite on paper, 2007
¤Eric Johnston
E.A. Poe Monument, graphite on paper, 2006
A People's Power Plant, graphite on paper, 2007 (not pictured above)
A Place for Ghosts, graphite on paper, 2007 (not pictured above)
¤Jan Razauskas
the evenutaul whole, pencil and ink on Mylar, 2006
COLLEGE PARK, MD – Traditional drawing and technological innovations are often viewed as long-term adversaries. In the mid 1800s, photography was accused of killing painting. In the new millennium, computer-aided drawing programs are implicated as threats to the pencil. Despite these allegations, the relationship between digital media and hand-made drawing has proven to be friendly and fruitful.
Drawing Zero 1 features works produced with hand tools that are subtly influenced by digital aesthetics. The artists all display a mastery of classical drawing techniques, imbued with sensibilities affected by an increasingly virtual environment.
Barb Bondy’s interests in science, art and philosophy inform her work. These interests point to the workspace of the human mind and brain, the relationship between the two, and how they affect an individual’s experience of the world. Drawing serves as a portal to seek greater understanding of the mechanizations of the mind and brain. It is an aesthetic system through which she can enter to mine information from her own interior space and to communicate her thoughts to others in the exterior world.
Eric Johnston sets out to gather up and organize all the loose parts and free radicals in his life by embodying his various stations in life through drawings of monuments. His works present an assortment of literary heroes, favorite foods, and the minutiae of the everyday, all carefully scrutinized and transformed into grandiose, often fantastic structures.
In her work, Jan Razauskas explores the vagaries of perception, and the connection or "trace" of time between static objects and linear events. The events in this instance are actions and processes that allude to motion, coalescence, metamorphosis and dispersion. The processes used to make her drawings reflect an ongoing interest in the possibilities of new approaches to materials. Processes driven by gravity, motion and evaporation pit an element of chance against more controlled processes.
This exhibition is sponsored in part by the Pepsi Enhancement Fund.
