Spatial Profiling: (After Margaret Dragu’s Eine Kleine Nacht Radio)

face touches wallrepeatedly outline profile using mark-making toolmove through spaceabstract pattern results

As an action, drawing is predicated on the double-edged task of observation and translation. The body is contoured in the negative space between.

When bodies make their mark at the point of contact between the figure and the ground, aesthetics becomes a moment: the rhythm of living flesh, in movement and stillness, in time and space; as the moment fades, the traces become an index: visible and invisible lines, shapes and imprints created through touch. The variables of this equation depend on the conditions that frame the action, and on the multidimensional coordinates of embodiment of the people who perform it. Along the history of any given gesture, certain formal aspects persist, but both the content and the context of the action resonate differently each time, alluding, eluding, reifying, contesting or revising its previous iterations. The meaning or meaninglessness of the action depends on its responsiveness to the site and on the moment in which it occurs. It is thus that the body can mobilize its agency, and the visual traces can become the vestige of the artist’s energy in motion.

(Inspired by a conversation with Margaret Dragu on a park bench in Vancouver, October 15, 2010.)

Views of portrait, close-up, trace from spatial profiling . . . Performed for Mayworks, Festival of Working People and the Arts, Toronto, 2013. Three-hour performance and site specific drawing, dimensions variable. Marker on wall. Photo: Manolo Lugo.

Views of portrait, close-up, trace from spatial profiling . . . Performed for Mayworks, Festival of Working People and the Arts, Toronto, 2013. Three-hour performance and site specific drawing, dimensions variable. Marker on wall. Photo: Manolo Lugo.

Views of portrait, close-up, trace from spatial profiling . . . Performed for Mayworks, Festival of Working People and the Arts, Toronto, 2013. Three-hour performance and site specific drawing, dimensions variable. Marker on wall. Photo: Manolo Lugo.