Drawing Archive

Transparent Things

2024, ink and residue on paper, 18’” x 24” ea., 94” x 49” overall

Transparent Things studies the immediacy, inexplicability, and “seemliness” of gesture. Intending to scrutinize the capacities of repetition and self-reference in the context of circuitous studio practice, Transparent Things repurposes materials and ephemera from the fabrication of Intersecting—One as implements and mediums in a choreography of insistent frottage. The resulting visual traces of this process are contingent on the material that “performed” the “dance.”

The drawings of Transparent Things act as a means to generate content, as secondary surfaces to supplement a poetic practice. Their installation indicates a recto-verso relationship; each image is accompanied by its inverse or foil. This allusion to the page highlights a synchronicity between the twin practices of image making and writing: the protocol of “drafting.” The cursory and disposable nature of the “draft” is embodied in unstable mediums (flower petals, bottle residue, dust), which allow the image’s surface to change over time. Through deterioration, the image and the hand that authors are subordinated by the endurance and luminosity of the blank page. Various instances of rupture suggest the crossing and dissolution of boundaries or a wry joke about dualist folly.

With these means, Transparent Things praises the interface through which text is brought into existence, considering negative space as expansive, fecund, raw material with inherent value. The series references Nabokov’s novella of the same title, notably the opening sequence in which Hugh Person defines the history and qualities of a particular, seemingly innocuous pencil, a “transparent thing” through which '“the past shines” and memory, once again, speaks.

Transparent Things 07 (Chain 1) (Detail)