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From the Curator

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List of works

FROM THE CURATOR Disintegration, as a working title for this exhibition, was chosen for its aptness in describing the breakdown of the divisions, which had stood so unshakably until recent years, between high and low art forms, and more specifically, between drawing and artistic autonomy. The history of drawing is positioned within contemporary art as interdisciplinary, and historically subject to the preparatory and educational requirements of painting, sculpture and printmaking. However, contemporary graphic culture operates with an increasingly sophisticated and expanding language.

This exhibition explores drawing as a primary and vital method of art making, examining the qualities of drawing, its philosophies and the media that share a relationship with drawing, developed over centuries of practice. However, Disintegration became an even more appropriate title with the outbreak of COVID-19, which caused its postponement, and lockdowns which are continuing even at the time of writing. Not surprisingly, these events have affected the ten artists included in this exhibition in different ways, adding further context to some of the choices on display within, and some of the societal pressures, even collapses, without. Things are changing rapidly in the studio, in the environment and in our society, and the outcomes are not all going to be positive.

This exhibition refers to drawing as an autonomous artistic discipline, as opposed to its contingent uses, such as preparatory drawing, commercial art, design and architecture. These practices, while related, are not a large part of this curatorial, which focuses instead on drawing as the technological and experiential response to the massive change catalysed by the virtual world. While drawing remains associated with traditions of preparatory process or as a pedagogical tool, it is no longer relegated to these discourses.i Recently, many high-profile exhibitions focused on drawing have found their way into major institutions. Nonetheless, rigorous investigation into changes in the discipline, specifically in relation to mass and digital cultures, has been less common.ii Remarkably, given the ubiquity of drawing in art practice, little attempt has been made to consolidate drawing’s role in light of technological change, a discourse that my research has sought to address in the neologism of metadrawing for some years. The resurgence of interest in drawing can be partially explained by the Modernist and Post-modernist collapses of genre and culture boundaries. The collapse of genre and beux arts are circumscriptions that began with photography, accelerated with collage and climaxed in minimalism and conceptual art. These collapses have allowed graffiti, comic books, animation, and contemporary commercial design to claim or reject cultural legitimacy as art forms. The pervasiveness of mass culture increases in traction not only in Pop, but increasingly in other art, so that today they are no longer just appropriations (as in Lichtenstein or Hamilton), but are seen to be art forms in their own right. While these varying forms have brought attention to drawing, their relative artistic autonomy is still anecdotal, for they seldom discuss in a critical way the discourse confined largely to description and comments about technical proficiency. Primarily associated with a commercial model, these forms are seemingly beyond or unconcerned with criticism, as a ‘techno-capitalist information communication culture.’iii Drawing remains an important investigative tool for the conceptualisation and execution of visual ideas, as an act that is deeply ingrained in many image-making processes.

Historically, drawing has seen a far broader variety of application, spanning the artistic and the scientific. Digital technologies have become indispensable to many vocations, including many that historically relied on drawing. There is much contemporary work that combines

traditional elements of drawing with digital technologies, theoretically and practically, some of which will be discussed here. However, the traditional qualities of drawing can be lost in translation, specifically its intuitive or improvisational quality, which necessitates this research into the contemporary positioning of drawing and the digital world. Metadrawing refers to drawing practices within and outside art making that have grown out of the manual practice of drawing but evolved beyond its traditional forms. For a clearer understanding of metadrawing, it is important to consider specific qualities of the drawing discipline as well as its traditional place within the fine arts, and put into the context of the contemporary post-digital and post-media era, and the implications therein. The very use of the term ‘drawing’ in this thesis works as an inclusive umbrella term because other, similar terms, particularly in the French (dessin), Italian (disegno) and German (Zeichnung) traditions, are often associated with a particular function or context, and in some instances no longer extant, now confined to history. Furthermore, the term ‘drawing’ reflects a discipline, practice and process that is connective and amorphous in nature, inclusive of these many and varied processes within its own context and history, where frequent overlap within other disciplines is understood. This thesis and accompanying studio research will not only demonstrate the validity of drawing in the digital age, but demonstrate its continuing conceptual and artistic development through practices associated with metadrawing.

It is now a commonplace to state that digital interfaces offer new, innovative avenues for drawing, including the challenge of potential technological obsolescence of the discipline altogether. Disintegration investigates contemporary modes of drawing, particularly in response to the increasing dominance of digital technologies. Some artists included herein explore a deliberate and considered divergence to (what one of them defines as) the disembodied digital experience.iv However, digital technologies have become so fully assimilated into the structures of society that they cannot be avoided, especially in consideration of expanded drawing. These technologies have the potential to extend the possibilities of the drawing indirectly, as a makeshift drafting tool itself, a convenient method for stockpiling or altering visual stimulus, or notably as a concept from which to explore on a micro and macro level, or simply to push back against.

Drawing itself has been brought to attention in recent years, with exhibitions such as MoMA’s Drawing From the Modern (2005), National Art School and Adelaide Central School of Art’s recurring Drawing Exchange programming, and the excellent I Walk the Line (2009), curated by Christine Morrow for Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. While curators of Drawing from the Modern could select from MoMA’s vast collection of graphic works, I Walk the Line featured a leaner selection of contemporary Australian artists, actively exploring the boundaries of the discipline. Such approaches would seem to validate the perspective on this research, choosing to investigate many strands of drawing practice, rather than establishing boundaries between them. Drawing from the Modern was a comprehensive chronology of drawing spanning the last century, and presented preparatory sketches and studies, side-by-side with drawings as finished works. The exhibition illuminated just how fully drawing has been absorbed into art practices in the latter decades of the twentieth century, and allowed a more intuitive, personal art unencumbered by philosophical trends and agendas, however, like many drawing exhibitions and particularly works on paper prizes, the exhibition (particularly selections of work from the first half of the 20th century) smacked of slumming painters’ preparatory works. This is a long term malady of drawing— to be viewed purely as a preparatory medium, rather than an autonomous discipline— which has persisted largely due to a persistent commercial bias toward painting.

In his essay ‘Brief History of Photography’ (1931), Walter Benjamin outlines the evolution of photography, as well as various responses to these developments within painting and throughout the visual and commercial arts. The application of Benjamin’s method of analysis to drawing aims to illuminate the circumstances that have been foregrounded by the advent of digital technologies, to which contemporary drawing must now respond. Benjamin’s discussion of the metaphysics of photography, a still relatively new medium at the time of writing, shares many parallels with the position of contemporary drawing. Disintegration explores discourses of image-making modelled upon Benjamin’s framework, forecasting implications upon the discipline and its future. In his essay Benjamin outlines the challenge that painting, particularly en pleinair and the portrait miniature, faced in the representational possibilities of the daguerreotype and then the photographv. Such paradigm shifts dramatically alter the possibilities of art through technical, philosophical and even perceptual challenges to tradition, just as digital technology has done recently, all of which are certainly germane to the future of drawing. Madeleine Joy Dawes’ work is a subtle shift in the typical ‘analogue versus digital’ discourse with which so many artists become fascinated. Dawes’ work painstakingly replicates the lo-fi aesthetic of early home printers, rendering images into the geometric dot matrices that were rendered obsolete with the advent of the bubble jet printer. Ironically, Dawes’ works are a far more durable and stable media, yet another reminder of the myth of digital media’s longevity. In the mimicry of the mechanical, her work reveals the flawed inconsistencies of human mark making wherein the spirit of gesture, or deus ex machina, resides. Dawes’ work, in its dense matrix of dots and dashes within a larger geometric patterns, comes to resemble the meditative intricacies of cross-stitch. Cross-stitch as a medium may appear to sit somewhat outside of Disintegration’s discussion of drawing, however at its core there is a significant consideration of graphic translation, of converting an image into a complex grapheme of constituent parts, to say nothing of its resemblance of the pixel. Dawes’ Disintegration work, however, reflects a significant shift for the artist, who relocated to inner-city Melbourne just in time for the beginning of sustained lockdown periods in 2020. In the past, the artist’s work has been created in response to the natural world, adaptations of picturesque scenes or forms that caught the artist’s eye while taking long walks. Instead of natural splendour, Dawes’ recent work has taken on a distinctive industrial, claustrophobic, even post-apocalyptic bent. Her now urban walks at the time of writing are limited to the prescribed 5km radius, uneasy in their emptiness of people, disconcerting in the inescapable sense of surveillance.

Central to the theory of drawing is the notion of the sketch, which conceptually anchors the discipline. The tension between incompleteness and resolution is one of the core conceptual considerations of drawing. Such exploration of drawing as an act of unrepeatability, dependent upon the intuitive nature of the drawing act, as well as the spontaneity the discipline can engender within a broad spectrum of conditions, is a perennial concern of artistic practice. Drawing’s past as a compositional tool to so many art forms, coupled with its contemporary autonomy, operate in parallel, contributing to its complexity. Drawing’s historically interdisciplinary application makes

it hard to define without mention of the other forms to which it has been applied, further stimulating innovation. Graphic art and design is now more than ever absorbed into the collective consciousness, and the aesthetics, vocabulary and culture of everyday life. This presents artists with a decision whether to enter the domain of tattoo design, skate graphics, video games, t-shirt designs, favouring aesthetics and design above all else, or to elevate drawing beyond mere design into art. This distinction must be made in response to the overwhelming graphic stimulus of contemporary life.

Given that it is fundamental to visual arts, it is no surprise that drawing has been discussed at length, particularly in discourse of history, practice and technique. However, drawing as a practice in its own right only comes to the fore at the beginning of the 19th Century. Few texts have contextualised how and why this has happened, or drawing’s implications on contemporary art, instead concentrating on history, and technique. Deanna Petherbridge’s erudite and ground-breaking The Primacy of Drawing (2010) is a comprehensive text that arranges its chapters thematically rather than chronologically. This allows a more complex historical overview and illustrates the tradition of drawing as a multi-faceted art form that does not progress at a consistent pace typical of most volumes attempting to overview drawing’s history. However thoroughly the publication covers the drawing discipline, the text does not investigate contemporary drawing at length. While the Petherbridge makes astute observations in her final chapter on contemporary drawing, these act more to raise questions about the future of drawing than to define it. This allows the author to cut through history with ease, discussing artists from different countries or centuries on the merits of their artistic concerns, rather than the linear progression of most histories. Petherbridge structures her text around the notion of drawing as continuum, asserting its separation from other forms of art, architecture and design at one end of the linear spectrum and coalesces with them at the other. The continuum stretches between finito and non finito, private and public, and the perceptual and the mimetic. The binary oppositions that pull drawings between extremes—sketchy and finished; spontaneous and measured; self-generating or outwardly directed; colour or monochromy— are linked by the moving line of drawing itselfvi . Claudine Marzik’s recent work embraces this notion as a means of forward momentum, with a series executed during, and in response to, the COVID-19 pandemic. This body of work, provocatively entitled The Cross Probes Everything is a series of work that fully embraces drawing as a means of exploration directly linked to the subconscious, a meditative response to something that has been so utterly dominant of the global discourse over the last two years and continues to do so. Whether the artist is charting deaths or rapidly multiplying cells (the cross conjures either association), Marzik’s work emphasizes multiplicity and interconnectivity. Like her works, we are modular, and deny it as we may, interdependent. The series equates to a cathartic pouring out of oneself, with each work contributing to an increasingly dense and visually complex whole. Marzik has used the repetition of the cross, laden with social and religious connotations, tracking pandemic deaths as a grim reminder, but a striking act of resistance.

The outlining of drawing’s connections with other disciplines, and significant developments and responses to technological advancements is necessary in order to understand its contemporary position. The history of drawing is made up of such responses to technical innovations and shifts in practice.

Artists have frequently contributed to drawing’s development through the preparatory, pedagogical, technical, commercial and the industrial functions of drawing’s past. Drawing’s interdisciplinary applicability is a defining characteristic of drawing that is still manifest in contemporary art.

Grant Stewart takes full advantage of technologies within his work, experimenting with both the limitations and vast potential of drawing machines. As in any artistic practice, such limitations prove just as crucial to the outcome as the imagination; a set of barriers to push up against, subvert or circumvent are essential in an exciting and surprising practice, and Stewart’s work is frequently so. These works result in stunning and impossible drawings, abstractions of the human gesture made with precision, yet replicating the imprecision which lurks on the periphery of awareness. Stewart’s works become a kind of charting of artistic entropy, beginning with strong forms and a breezy beauty in its repetition. After inputting code which directs the drawing machines, over time, the repetition plays out, slowly unwinding and undoing itself; there is no way for the machine to judge the end of its process, no way to make the crucial decision of finish. In this way, Stewart reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the human and the machine, exposing the dovetailing of where one begins and the other ends. Ironically, in deploying the drawing machines to create the works, the most lively and individualistic elements of the works emerge from flaws in materials rather than the machines themselves. Helena Papageorgiou works in a wholly digital space. An animator by trade, Papageorgiou is adept with tablet work, a relatively new addition to the expansive tools of drawing, allowing the rapid development of the volume of work necessary for animation. For Disintegration, Papageorgiou has created a lush digital work, augmented with ab immersive virtual experience, accessible by gallery goers with handy access to a smartphone. Papageorgiou’s work emulates the world-building immersion of a science fiction novel cover for a story that doesn’t exist. By exhibiting in both the physical and virtual space, works such as Papageorgiou’s questions the continued relevance of institutions such as the gallery, which traditionally peddle in experiences that, while expansive and cerebral, have been largely anchored to the physical experience (as is this work). The pandemic-instigated lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 have forced institutions to rapidly assimilate virtual technologies in order to continue with some degree of public service. Admittedly, this is a stopgap solution, for works created to be experienced in person will always have translation issues, just as the opposite is true. Papageorgiou considers both at once, offering a sympatico experience of both physical and virtual media. Miles Hall’s relationship to the digital has is one of antipathy. Rather than embracing digital technologies, Hall’s response is to immerse himself more deeply within tradition, finding new methodologies in divergence from such technology. Hall’s work actively engages with the theories of the screen or the picture plane as a surface in and of itself, in the Greenbergian mode of abstraction. Working non-objectively, Hall’s most powerful work is often ‘left’ at a critical moment, stopped at a point of tension and unfinish. The unfinished drawing as marker of skill and sensibility is a venerable (if sometimes overlooked) aspect of the discipline.vii Pentimenti operates on both the conceptual and the physical level of drawing. Pentimenti, a drawing term, is used to describe a permanent line or mark that cannot be so easily erased, transforming the sketch to a finished work. The word itself is derived from the word ‘repentance’, implying sorrow at the loss of the sketch itself.viii The idea of repentance through drawing has an undertone of religious piety, a solemnity that acknowledges drawing’s importance to the fundamentals of art and design. In the context of Panter’s work, pentimenti is applicable not only to the drawings themselves, but the way text and narrative are used within the work, which is usually scrambled or non-linear, Indeed, Pentiminti is an accurate descriptor for Hall’s approach to drawing, which

is an evolving exploration of media and gestural, non-objective mark making. Often, works that could conceivably be considered finished themselves become platforms for further exploration; often, Hall will tape off a section of a work and coat it with a perfectly matte pour of deliciouslysurfaced pain (think of icing a cake), or applying a screeding of surface with a sponge, leaving only hints of the work beneath. In this way, Hall’s approach is that of a scientist, or a baker; there are base elements to be considered, and experimented with in a set context, but the emergent possibilities are endless.

The contemporary refinement and assimilation of digital technologies has affected drawing in different ways. With the emergence of such technologies, drawing faces a similar challenge as painting faced in photography, of being, in Benjamin’s terms, ‘supplanted by technology’ix . Speed remains an attractive quality; as the photographic process challenged painting with its speed and reproducibility, so too is drawing challenged by digital technologies. Digital technologies have engendered many new possibilities for drawing that extends into animation, printing, colour design, 3D modelling and printing, architecture and design. Importantly, these technologies have attracted the commercial art world as a cheaper and faster solution to industrial design. This shift has prompted in drawing a previously unavailable remove from the commercial arts, which has enabled drawing to take a more prominent and autonomous role in contemporary art. While drawing is still used in some commercial arts such as animation, fashion design and comic books, it is predominately assisted or co-opted by digital processes. Jess Johnson’s intricate works identify a cast of strange, uncanny creatures that can be spotted populating her virtual works (North Queenslanders may have had the good fortune to experience Johnson’s Terminus, created with Simon Ward, at Cairns Regional Gallery recently, a virtual reality tour de force which extends directly from Johnson’s drawings). While the artist’s work in the virtual spaces is stunning in its execution, the same can be said for her drawings. Intricate arrangements of tessellating patterns and geometric forms are rendered flawlessly by hand, creating otherworldly environs for her creatures (some humanoid, some… otherwise) to traverse. What is perhaps so striking about these works are their flawless surface; rendered with such delicacy, Johnson’s works seem at first at home beside the super flat, cartoon surfaces of Takashi Murakami, the horror vaccui of Zak Smith, and the ‘endless staircases’, for want of a better term, of M.C Escher. However, moving beyond art history, Johnson’s work incorporates many parallels with video games, even without considering her virtual environments, in their deliberate manipulation of perspective to create the illusion of space, the use of modular geometric forms to world build, and a seeming fascination with visual puzzles.

Strangely, digitally unassisted drawing is now a practice almost exclusive to artists. Digital technologies have amplified a dimension of drawing that can now be considered ‘traditional’, that is, drawing that occurs in physical rather than virtual space.

Hand drawing can now be retroactively considered a subversive discipline, especially in the contemporary context, where it is not strictly necessary. The ‘traditional’ can now be re-deployed by drawing because it has been absorbed into digital practices, the perverse dimension of the insistence of drawing in the age of digital process. Many practices and ideas associated with commercial drawing have been absorbed into other media after decades, and in some cases centuries, of symbiotic existence. Until recently, it had often been the commercial implications of drawing that, from an academic perspective, held the discipline within the commercial sphere. Drawing has always been present in art, as well as design, fashion, architecture and sequential arts such as comics, film and animation. The digital destabilization of traditional institutional structures of the art world

and boundaries of high and low have encouraged a re-evaluation of drawing’s standing. With commercial concerns largely abandoning the act of drawing, coupled with the exploration and destruction of boundaries between high and low art forms of modernism and postmodernism, drawing has become topical for the first time for many years.

Jumaadi frequently uses drawing as a vehicle for the spiritual, the erotic and the mythic. Often reinterpreting historical and folkloric of his native Indonesia, Jumaadi’s work is figurative, but deeply allegorical, a collage of imagery remixed for the gallery wall. Such mythologies are used as starting points from which the artist begins to accumulate imagery, emotions and even doodles, cohering into more personal narrative structure. For Disintegration, the artist has worked on homemade paper to create large scale body parts. Hung in clusters, the work simulates movement, and is an example of the artist’s prolific output, with the modular work forming structure against the negative space of the wall, two design elements that the artist frequently plays with. The work is a response to the isolation of the pandemic. Jumaadi, as diasporic artist, has found a doublyisolating situation to contend with, unable to travel without Australia to family and friends, and unable to do so within. Home is where the heart is, or so the truism goes, and this particular body of work takes this literally, with its detached body parts forming a collage of the push and pull of travel and lockdown.

Ideas adapted from drawing’s pedagogical and preparatory past have been successfully translated into digital hardware and software for design, architecture, animation, and even general platform functionality. This metadrawing is imbued with the interdisciplinary applicability of drawing, but its extension into the physical world is facilitated by the virtual. However, the virtual state differs fundamentally with drawing in its greatly minimised tactility, and the reconfigured cognitive intuition required of users, forming the basis for their separate categorisation. Drawing retains its identity, or its state, but is applied in principle to the virtual world through metadrawing.

Metadrawing is made with an awareness of its implications as an action, as an art object and an art form, and is not necessarily limited to X substance on X support. A definition of metadrawing must be as flexible as that of drawing, which is constantly shifting, being both inclusive of artists working within other media. In light of the recent elevation of drawing to autonomous status, which is to some extent tethered to contemporary art, metadrawing suffers no such limitation. Justin Garnsworthy deploys a digital/analogue hybrid practice which is a fascinating glimpse into the potential of art making in both spaces. Using technologies to escape the impositions of the divisive high/ low binary, Garnsworthy explores the gestures and markmaking we associate with the ‘real’ made possible by the multiplicity and broad adaptability of digital technologies. This is achieved through multiple levels of process which include the incorporation of the artist’s physical gestures through rubbing, stretching and scraping various media (including the wonderful plasticity of blu-tack), the traces of which are imposed or scanned into the virtual space for further manipulation. Through these technologies, the thinking, questing, figuring disciplines of drawing can then be more broadly applied to other forms, outside the traditional domain of the discipline, allowing drawing a renewed vitality and influence over a broader domain than ever.

In terms of parallels between drawing and metadrawing, there is evidence of accessibility in both circumstances. Hand drawing is constitutive of metadrawing, but at its core is an economical practice, especially compared to traditional painting or sculpture. Upon further consideration, drawing’s inexpensive requirements are the simplest explanation of how drawing originally came to be used as a preparatory discipline. Digital drawing technologies mirror this accessibility not so much in affordability, which is variable, but in its seemingly infinite reproducibility, coupled with its independence from a physical support.

The digital drafting process, such as it is, can be completely incorporated in and of itself into the final, finished outcome. So as the act of drawing was historically related to, but not a part of, so many media, so too does metadawing relate to media in the contemporary world. Metadrawing reflects the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries, care of digital technologies, and the implied resolution of the high/low discourse. The binary of drawing and metadrawing is an important component of contemporary drawing, because it is an updated consideration of the ways drawing has traditionally spanned and connected different art forms and media. Unlike Pop art, which approached appropriation with different degrees of irony and nostalgia, and an assumed stance of art and popular culture being entirely separate, metadrawing exists with knowledge that such borders have been destabilized. Digital technologies have fostered a culture that operates with a deep and familiar knowledge of mass culture and, by default, at least a basic anthropological knowledge of other areas, indentured through this knowledge of mass culture. While not strictly art per se, the long-running animated series TheSimpsons frequently makes references to other sources, both high and low. Any episode can contain frequent and explicit references to pop music, art, film, literature, television, animation, comic books, gay culture, beat poetry, celebrity culture, and often incorporates self-reflexivity.

The work of Phoebe Paradise collides imagery appropriated from such popular iconography, the abstraction of cartoons and many references to her own playful self-mythologising. Paradise, already herself an impressively vivacious character, embraces a kind of self-parody not unlike dragging, emphasizing and exaggerating aspects of her own physiology and personality into an accentuated, performative kind of (public) identity. Here, Paradise is a pimply, 80s punk rocker with a chipped front tooth; there, she is a stacked, armoured space barbarian with an axe and Gene Simmons makeup. These personas have been expanded into the virtual realm in the form of a social media filter; in 2021, Paradise launched three downloadable filters based on three cartoon versions of herself, CHROME WITCH, CASUAL FRIDAYS and I AM EVIL, satisfying the social media needs of anybody who needs to feel, on occasion, like a sexy space drag queen (who doesn’t, I mean, really). Disintegration, however, features a rather analogue example of the artist’s work, a denim jacket which has served as a sort of sketch book in recent years. Drawn and painted over several times, the jacket has become a living work, a kind of living punk rock pentimenti, more journal that haute couture. The jacket actually serves as a response to the artist’s reliance upon digital technologies which are used in the design of her clothing and products; little ephemera, such as sketch books and doodles are left, for they take place entirely within the virtual world. To adorn the jacket, by hand, serves as both a marker of the artist’s roots, and a placeholder for the creation of work for no other reason, without the pressures of production.

Much contemporary drawing resembles remix culture, taking place in a contemporary legal world increasingly protective of its properties, which often include trademarked melodies, characters and images across the expanding visual world.x The increasingly litigious post-digital society in which contemporary drawing and metadrawing now exist form the cultural backdrop to which many artists respond.

Contestable legal territory creates a problematic situation for artists that use satire and/or appropriation of popular culture in their work, although there are many historical precedents of litigation, particularly in the field of printmaking. Raymond Pettibon was once legally advised to stop using the ‘Vavoom’ character, who was originally from the animated world of Felix the Cat, in his drawings. This is unlike Batman, Superman, Gumby, and many other copyrighted characters that Pettibon sometimes incorporates into his drawings without such incident. Copyright is a contestable and sometimes litigious property, and despite innovation on the part of artists, has grown more legally problematic in the digital age.xi Technologies evolve at a rate that outpaces legislation by a significant margin; consider that, at the time of writing, there are still legal wranglings occurring around the practice of sampling, which emerged four decades ago.

Drew Connor Holland’s work is a remarkable synthesis of ideas usually associated with printmaking and digital media, extending the remit of drawing well into unexplored territory. In Holland’s hands, drawing resembles Paul Klee’s approach as an intuitive, heuristic conceptpractice, a means of seeking and exploring, rather than a simple media designation, and conceptual precursor to metadrawing. Holland, using digital platforms such as Second Life, takes screen shots of uncanny scenes, which are then printed onto handmade paper. Like the paper itself, which is made up of any number of traditional and non-traditional paper constituents, imbricates characters (and sometimes a digital avatar of the artist himself) into a dense and bizarre lexicon. Occasionally straying into overt popular culture (wrestler-turned Hollywood action hero, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is a favourite, and recurring, addition). This recurring cast of characters that, unlike recognisable or iconic characters, have little meta-narrative already attached to them. Thus the viewer is forced to unlock these codes, which are often self-reflexive and require a knowledge of or experience with Holland’s oeuvre, on their own. Holland frequently deploys misinformation in his work, visual red herrings that put distance between viewers and his image-making process, and partly contrary resistance to the idea of one fixed reading which are as complex as the ingredients used to make his own paper. Like Holland’s images, his paper, made up of any number of constituents, readings are encouraged or even suggested through hints and snatches of narrative, but a concrete reading, is stubbornly resisted. Characters are sometimes out of proportion, as if drawn from different sources themselves, or fade into nothing behind another element of the composition- all of these signs and signifiers conjure the of collage process, itself existing prominently on the Klee continuum of drawing as a primary driver for artistic practice.

Drawing continues to operate within a continuum of human activity, enabled by technological innovation, suspend the fundamental truth of drawing inherent in its unrepeatability. It is in this way that drawing subverts itself, continuing to exist as it always has, via action, and simultaneously echoing itself in the mass-media, through metadrawing.

The inherent tension of drawing, of the real and the unreal, manifests throughout each stage in its own development. Through this research, the qualities of drawing have been applied to a broad spectrum of studio approaches and strategies, allowing heuristic process to augment research in several ways. Through the physical execution of drawings on paper, this studio research explores the tactile, sensual aspects of mark making, creating a body of work that incorporates many of the physical, meditative and improvisatory approaches that cannot be quantified in terms exterior to the experience. These gestures, in tandem with the gathering, editing and collating of visual stimulus materials, which cite a different texts and media themselves, combine to produce additional registers of meaning. These registers explore narratives, both functioning within the work and self-reflexively elaborating on the circumstances of its own creation, and incorporate allusions to, and ciphers appropriated from, other texts. By incorporated these registers of meaning, the work becomes both sincere and self-effacing, concealing its complexity by way of revealing its own secrets. These works revel in their own narrative ambiguity, demanding speculative interpretation, rather than a fixed reading. Opposing the equalising, monocultural force of the virtual world, but embracing its interconnectivity, this work seeks to evoke through its imagery a questing, unfulfillable narrative desire in its viewers, while simultaneously satisfying their appetites for the visceral, physical and primal aspects of mark making. The role of drawing is no longer strictly necessary to artistic, commercial or industrial production, but its thriving perseverance proves its necessity for addressing the world between the physical, the virtual, and the unknowable. In exploring the relationship between drawing and other media, particularly the virtual, the artist is ideally positioned to demand a higher level of visual and cognitive innovation of the virtual, while expanding the language of art.

JONATHAN MCBURNIE

Curator

i. Deanna Petherbridge, The Primacy of Drawing. (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2010), 3. ii. Daina Augaitis, For the Record: Drawing Contemporary Life. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery, 2003, 14. iii. Miles Hall, The Anatomy of an Image: Painting in the Digital Age. (Brisbane: Griffith University, 2010), 7. iv. Ibid., 7. v. Walter Benjamin, ‘Brief History of Photography.’ Translated by J. A. Underwood. In One-Way Street and Other Writings (London: Penguin, 2008), 179. vi. Petherbridge, Primacy of Drawing, 16. vii. Adam Geczy, ‘Always Incomplete: On the Virtuous Weakness of Drawing.’ Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art vol. 1, no. 2 (2000): 199. viii. Petherbridge, Primacy of Drawing, 31. ix. Benjamin, Brief History of Photography, 179. x. Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the

Hybrid Economy. (London: Penguin, 2008), 17-18. xi. Ibid., 10.

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