My large scale wall drawings grew out of a body of work with pencil and ink on diagonal graph paper. This type of 120° grid is known as isometric, and is intended for use by engineers and architects to draft 3-dimensional objects without perspective distortion. The drawings I made in this medium take advantage of this tilted space to carve patterns that resolve in symmetry far beyond the frame. I called each of the drawings a Fragment of a Much Larger Thing.
Certain motifs established themselves and became the subject of familial variations. In the year 2000, I turned to one such recurring motif for my first wall drawing at Flipside, one of the most discerning of the artist-run spaces of Williamsburg’s underground prime. For a group show called “Flashlight,” the gallerists darkened the space and viewers could only see the artists’ work by wielding the device of the title. (This was before cellphones banished the darkness.) I had found that the bubbles in bubblewrap, besides making an interesting texture in raking light, were squeezed together in a dependable isometric grid, so I scaled up my drawing by poking metal pushpins into the wall through the lines of bubbles.
My first true wall drawing, Temple, was for a group show at the Williamsburg gallery Plus Ultra in 2001. There I transferred one of my isometric motifs to a wall, by poking holes into the plaster at the vertices of a scaled-up cartoon in the manner of a Renaissance fresco artist. The design had been drawn in marker on the smooth backside of bubblewrap, again using its isometric bubble pattern as a scaled up grid. After the removal of the cartoon, the pin marks allowed me to locate the lines and intersections of the drawing in graphite. A final layer of ink was applied with markers and straight edge. Shading was added with color pencil.
I continued to use this method for for several years, including for Flooding in 2001 at Bill Maynes Gallery; Cityhall 2002, at Locks Gallery in Philadelphia (curated by David Cohen); and Reticulum, 2002, at Virginia Commonwealth University, Anderson Gallery (curated by John Yau, exhibited alongside a painting). After the exhibition, the wall drawings would disappear under fresh paint.
Documenting the finished works proved difficult and unsatisfactory. Delicate lines covering expanses of white wall –– Flooding was over 20 feet wide –– were difficult to light and photograph, even with a large format camera. Therefore I began to reconstruct the drawings as vector files on Adobe Illustrator, in order to have a pristine record of their design as a supplement to the grainy photography. In 2003, however, during an artist’s residency at Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center in Buffalo, NY, I decided to work digitally from the outset. This allowed me to print wide-format paper templates to precise scale, no longer limited by bubble multiples, for a four-part wall drawing I called Descent. The printed lines allowed for much more accurate pinpricks and thus more complexity of detail. All subsequent wall drawings used this process, including Disobey This Command! installed at the Drawing Center and Latterdays installed at the Brooklyn Museum, both in 2004.
While my last true wall drawings were made in 2006, the compositional thinking behind them persists in different form. In the residency at Hallwalls, I had time after completing the four-part drawing to try an experiment on my computer: build in three dimensions what I had designed in two. I had to devise my own technique in order to reproduce the line quality and non-perspective space of the isometric drawings within a photorealistic animation program. But once the models existed in this virtual space they could be transformed over time— animated— using any of the myriad tools of the program.
The film that ultimately resulted from the HallWalls installation, Proliferation was my return after a long hiatus to abstract filmmaking. (For more context, please see About My Work. Similarly, I added an animation component to the installation at The Drawing Center in 2004, which led to the film Disobey This Command! Over time, I gradually shifted my efforts from drawing on paper and walls to drawing in time, with several of my films departing directly from the motifs of my drawing practice.
For a 2018 exhibition at the Maryland Institute College of Art (curated by Willy Hartland) I revived certain aspects of my wall drawing practice. The motif here is related to my installation at Pierogi/The Boiler in 2014.
