Drawing Clarification

I use drawing as a way of mapping the spatial structures of a dance and visualizing initial images and ideas. I draw figures in motion. I sketch costumes, props, and sets. I create diagrams of stage configurations and have even utilized drawing as an action in my performances. Fundamentally, however, drawing serves as a site for experimentation and process. It is where I grapple in purely visual form with the underlying concepts of my work. I devise intricate systems to create drawings of overlapping forms and lines, attempting to follow my own arbitrary rules as strictly as possible. This results in densely layered transparencies similar to the overlaying of image, sound, and identity in my performance work. The act of drawing provides momentary liberation from the need to justify, analyze, or explain the messy contradictions that often arise during the creative process. Drawing is focused and clarifying. It helps me bridge the gap between image and language and between form and social content.

COLOR PARADE

Color Parade, 2014, an eight-hour performance installation presented by R.O.V.E. in a storefront window of the Roger Smith Hotel, NYC. I papered the walls of the window display with layers of contact paper. Over the course of the performance, I made drawings on the walls in duct tape and felt pen, including portraits of the performers in their costumes. The dancers and I gradually peeled away layers of contact paper creating new forms and surfaces for further drawing and manipulation of the materials until the entire installation was dismantled into a pile of debris.

Dancer: Ben Asriel.

Photo: Walter Dundervill. Courtesy the artist.

Portrait of dancer Jennifer Kjos, contact paper, felt pen.

Photo: Walter Dundervill. Courtesy the artist.

ARENA

These drawings are part of an ongoing practice related to how I construct performances, particularly my interest in the layering of information, form, and imagery. I translated the system of these pen drawings into drawings of fabric and ribbon that I execute during ARENA. In ARENA, the performers interact with the ribbon drawing, disrupting its geometry and creating new forms and color arrangements.

Untitled Line Drawing 2, felt pen on paper, 2016.

Photo: Walter Dundervill. Courtesy the artist.

Ribbon Drawing, 2014.

Photo: Walter Dundervill. Courtesy the artist.

Performance at MoMA PS1, 2016. Photo: Maria Baranova.