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Quick and Dirty
The 'Quick and Dirty' exhibition was an early inward facing pop-up show at WCA, initiated and curated by Helen Dear and Constanza Marques Guedes. For someone like myself who had very limited experience actually participating in group contemporary art shows prior to the MFA, it was an incredibly helpful experience in how it demonstrated the potential for dialogues between diverse work in a space. Not only does the work change the space, and the space change the work, but the dynamics created between the work has a lot to be said for the success of any curation.
I ended up helping out with the installation of the show, which was the beginning of what has since been an interesting learning curve in the installing of various kinds of work in various environments.
Outside of paying more attention to curation, and beginning to take an interest in installation, 'Quick and Dirty' shone a light on the importance of collaboration, compromise, and the management of personalities for group shows. As emerging artists exhibition space - even within our own university - can be at a premium, and I believe that being able to negotiate the given space in creative and collaborative ways goes a long way.
Quick and Dirty
The 'Quick and Dirty' exhibition was an early inward facing pop-up show at WCA, initiated and curated by Helen Dear and Constanza Marques Guedes. For someone like myself who had very limited experience actually participating in group contemporary art shows prior to the MFA, it was an incredibly helpful experience in how it demonstrated the potential for dialogues between diverse work in a space. Not only does the work change the space, and the space change the work, but the dynamics created between the work has a lot to be said for the success of any curation.
I ended up helping out with the installation of the show, which was the beginning of what has since been an interesting learning curve in the installing of various kinds of work in various environments.
Outside of paying more attention to curation, and beginning to take an interest in installation, 'Quick and Dirty' shone a light on the importance of collaboration, compromise, and the management of personalities for group shows. As emerging artists exhibition space - even within our own university - can be at a premium, and I believe that being able to negotiate the given space in creative and collaborative ways goes a long way.
Arc
Arc
Arc
Coming into the MFA program I found myself very conflicted, and frankly frustrated, as to the direction I was taking with my work. My practice felt divided between a deep-seated - though largely unexplored - attachment to the process itself of drawing, and the socio-politically active side of my life that had yet to find much expression in my work.
In an attempt to resolve this divide I worked on a Hypermasculinity Series. In these works the aim was to communicate the point at which some men reach what seems like an apex in performed, clichéd masculinity that ends up becoming either 'toxic' or violently self-destructive. The glitch effect used in many of these drawings was included with the metaphor of 'heat death' in mind, whereby something evolves to a state of no thermodynamic free energy and can no longer sustain processes that increase entropy. While these works at the very least helped me to begin to re-think my practice, the results felt very limited in a consideration of the process of their making and in the feeling that the attachment to illustration was preceding the concept.
Following on from the first attempts, I began to reflect more on the process and labor of these concentrated drawing studies. Through tutorials I was given a vocabulary to verbalize and therefore focus on the notion of value in relation to labor of different kinds, and the value of the chosen subjects themselves. In many cases I gravitated towards conventionally 'low value' subjects, and treated them with an attention to detail and concentration normally reserved for more 'high value' subjects. Further, this was generally done with exclusively carbon-based, 'primitive' mediums.
Coupled with a growing fascination with Hito Steyerl's The Wretched of the Screen (more information to this point can be found in the 'Context' section), the next two works tried to logically follow on from the previous conversation about masculinity while also bringing the notion of value to the forefront. One, a charcoal rendering of an image of young Mike Tyson screenshot from a poor quality YouTube video, tried to incorporate a reading of Hito Steyerl's thoughts on the hierarchy of image quality in the digital world. The piece was done at a much larger scale (60 x 48 in) which satisfied a personal need for physicality in the process of drawing - a need which has since found some clarity in researching Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint series. Simultaneously I was building a few rudimentary tattoo machines, using only elements that might be available to incarcerated prisoners, as an object-driven expression of economies of value. Further, these two pieces were an important step in opening myself up to an ethos of the 'concept driving the medium' as opposed to the reverse, something I have been guilty of for much of my artistic career.
'Drawing Restraint 2', Matthew Barney, 1988.
Drawing Restraint - Matthew Barney, 1987
In describing the origins of Drawing Restraint, Barney proposes that "as an athlete you understand that your body requires resistance in order to grow" and that for him the same self-imposed resistance could be applied to the generation of form, or to the process of drawing.
At the centre of the Drawing Restraint series there is a physical laboriousness that tempts the artist - or at least is the case in my practice - with the reward of some sort of understanding (sought after in the labor intensive drawings of the Consensual Crimes series). Whether that promise is actually fulfilled or not is another question, but the process nonetheless strives for it. Elaborated on in the Narrative Identity section, this 'promise' has its pitfalls. The idea that effort, struggle, physicality, and laboriousness is somehow equal to value encourages a particular normative view of masculinity that, when pushed to extremes, can perpetuate certain cycles of violence or "psychic self-mutilation" (The Will To Change, bell hooks, 2004).
In Rottweiler, the protagonist swings between these poles: that of struggling towards value through pure labor and physicality, and of relinquishing that performative masculinity for something perhaps more tender and sustainable.
From a technical standpoint, the 'set' of Rottweiler intentionally aims to echo those of the early Drawing Restraint series (figured left) - from the monochromatic palette, nondescript white room but for a mess of industrial props and physical obstacles, to the composition of the frame itself and staccato movements of the protagonist.
Barney's early work - which featured something of an economy of means by virtue of the static camera and DIY aesthetic, is echoed in aspects of Lockdown Diary.
Screenshot from Rottweiler, 2019.
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