New Drawings
October 12 - November 24, 2009
Gallery Lounge, CSB
Reception: Thursday, October 22, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Artist Talk: Thursday, October 22, 5:30 p.m.
Gallery Lounge, CSB

Artist Statement:
The work in ‘New Drawings’ is about moving.

Moving from one place to another. Physically moving ones possessions from one place to another. This work is also about the way materials pass through our lives, such as paper that is read then recycled; moving on somewhere else, and snow that falls clean and white and is then made into huge piles which gather dirt, signifying time. The work also refers to the constant motion of our domestic life: washing and folding laundry only to have a new dirty pile the next day,

In ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’’, Joan Didion describes how her domestic life, with its attendant chores helped to “shore up her life”, holding onto the small things when the large seemed out of control. “ Clean sheets. Stacks of clean towels…………….these fragments I have shored against my ruins. Those fragments mattered to me. I believed in them.”

The human need to organize space by stacking, piling, folding our closest and most necessary possessions.

Shift. 

Move from one place to another. 

Possessions pass through our lives; some held and coveted, others shifting.

Papers read; papers recycled.

Snow fallen in sheets; snow plowed into piles.

Clothes folded and organized; clothes left in soiled heaps.

Each state of shifting presupposes the other: moving forward, moving backward.  This work examines the constant motion of our domestic life, the constant state of arriving where we have just been.  Interrupting the cycle of our daily grind reveals dominant landscapes--places that are visited and revisited.  Some are fleeting, others more static.  All provide the comfort of our human need to organize space.

“I learned to find equal meaning in the repeated rituals of domestic life…Clean sheets.  Stacks of clean towels…These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
Joan Didion The Year of Magical Thinking