Acts of Violence:
Drawing in a State of Exception
Claire McLarney

This installation will exist for only a brief period of time. By creating site-specific drawings that exist in a vulnerable state between randomness and intention, I can engage the act of drawing as a root experience. Producing wall drawings that are transitory in nature disengages traditional references to a fixed art object and disrupts inherited ideas about what constitutes a picture plane or image. The relationship between the work and the architecture of the room is of primary importance: the work strives to inhabit the space as if it were a living organism. All steps, revisions, failed attempts and activity around the installation is made visible as a testimony to the time leading up to the completion of the final product.

Sol LeWitt, Eva Hesse and Richard Tuttle are engaged in a similar dialogue. These artists were a part of a cultural movement that stressed impermanence, which was coined the “de-materialization” of the art object by Lucy Lippard. The site-specific nature and frank temporality of their work has greatly influenced the way I approach art making. Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings are explicitly bound to the architectural interiors they are situated. Art critic Scott Burton has stated “its installation is made synonymous with its existence, whereas a painting or fixed-form sculpture, no matter how radical its esthetic, does not literally cease to be when it is in storage.” This site-specificity, as well as the time-based phenomena of instability and degradation of Hesse and Tuttle’s work, are two determining factors in my practice. The material used in the construction of Hesse’s art has resulted in certain pieces becoming un-exhibitable over time due to their fragility and disintegration. In Tuttle’s case, his intentional use of non-archival materials will result in a similar fate. The transient, finite qualities of these pieces are a part of the story the work has to tell.

Creating art that cannot be exhibited the same way twice, and requires the direct involvement and physical presence of the artist, is a way I can approach my work as an act of experience. The focus is not on creating finished or composed drawings that have traditional associative readings, but act to disrupt the picture plane as a unified visual tool. The ephemeral nature of the materials used reinforces the finite conditions surrounding this installation. The work will be realized on site and subsequently destroyed when the exhibition is removed.

Exhibition date: January 11 – February 10, 2007

gallery   Baxter   Forbes