PROJECTS: Drawing Contemporaries, 2009

Steve Lambert and I were invited to participate in Drawing Contemporaries at Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology in NYC, curated by Michael Mandiberg. For this show we made a new collaborative set of drawings. This time, I made mine in Iowa City, and Steve made his in NYC. We each photographed them separately, and then made extras that we displayed next to the photographs in the exhibition. We gave away the extra drawings to gallery visitors. Here are some examples of the signs I made in Iowa, and then the installation of the show in New York.

Drawing Contemporaries, curated by Eyebeam senior fellow Michael Mandiberg, was an exhibition of work on paper made by a peer group of new media artists who all create drawings, both as a primary object and as an experimental process. For many of the artists, the use of computers and algorithms are the focus in their work. While a number of the artists are Eyebeam affiliated, all are contemporaries whose influences upon each other can be traced in this exhibition. Drawing Contemporaries was on exhibit May 21 – June 9, 2009.

Darren Kraft uses powdered graphite to photorealistically reproduce icons and logos associated with consumer and political culture; Eyebeam senior fellow Steve Lambert and Julia Schwadron write personal and poetic messages of hope, which they leave taped up in public places; Eyebeam senior fellow Michael Mandiberg uses the laser cutter to etch and carve works on paper that incorporate text, history, and design; Marisa Olson performs google image searches for obsolete technologies, and traces their contours directly off her laptop screen with a mechanical pencil; and Lee Walton creates elaborate indexes of possible graphic marks which are algorithmically used to document events as they occur. His subjects range from pedestrian traffic to sports games.