New Work: In Progress

Charley Peters, Untitled Study (2012), Inkjet Prints of a Photograph of a Drawing 

Current studio activity is focused around the development of small heavily worked graphite drawings onto newsprint (below). As the drawing is developed the repetitive strokes of the graphite manipulate the surface of the delicate paper causing it to ripple, line and in some cases rip. When photographed these movements in the paper surface are highlighted further due to the reflection of light from the metallic finish of the graphite. The above image shows two colour inkjet prints displayed next to each other on the studio wall.

Charley Peters, Untitled Drawing (2012), Graphite on Newsprint

Further compositional explorations using prints and photocopies of the graphite drawings are being made on the studio wall (below).

Charley Peters, Untitled (2012), Inkjet Prints of a Photograph of a Drawing

New Work: In Progress

Charley Peters, Untitled Collages (2012), Cut Paper, Photocopies & Inkjet Prints

Cut and collaged photocopies and inkjet prints used in the studio to explore composition and texture. The material was generated from photographs taken of graphite drawings, the metallic surface being represented photographically as a shiny, uneven surface, distressed and manipulated by the intense application of graphite onto the surface of newsprint, a fragile and easily disrupted drawing support.

Movement on TBC Online Project Space

Charley Peters Autogenous (2011), unique inkjet drawings on paper

For its sixth issue, TBC's online publication 12-Pages asked artists to respond to the theme of Movement. Contributors from Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, Norway, the US and the UK combined with members of TBC Artists' Collective to comment on change, stasis, dynamism and process in contemporary art practice.

My contribution is a series of drawings produced on a photocopier and inkjet printer. In Autogenous, initial line drawings were subjected to continual processes of copying and overprinting. The results are organic, lines are transformed by the mechanical intervention of the hardware involved, and the process of drawing continued until the printer ink ran out.

Movement, edited by Paul Mendez and Charley Peters, can be seen in full here, and at 12-pages.com, which also details how artists can submit work to the forthcoming issue, Radicals.

Open publication - Free publishing - More art

Studio Views: Work in Progress

Studio photograph of work in progress (2011)

The photograph above, taken today in the studio, illustrates current work on a new drawing. Hand-drawn squares of graphite have been repeatedly photocopied until the image surface becomes disrupted, and then the resultant mechanically produced interventions are re-drawn exactly by hand.

Work in progress (2011)

Sketches: Xerox Drawings

'Drawings' generated on a photocopier. Sketches for future works exploring visual interference and drawing processes.

Anatomy of a Projection.

Left: Viral I (detail), graphite on paper
Right: Viral II (detail), graphite on paper

The Viral series of drawings, which will be previewed at the Delineation: Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing exhibition in October, explores the relationship between mechanically produced and hand rendered marks. The works reproduce the toner traces left on distorted photocopies of found images, projected and traced to generate a large-scale exact copy of the disrupted images. Viral I presents the pixellated visual interferences retained when images are processed through a digital projector attached to a laptop, Viral II the comparatively smooth contours of lines presented by projecting image data through an OHP - digital vs analogue information.

Sketches

'The photocopier is one of the most recent in a long line of instruments conceived for the mechanical reproduction of visual material. But unlike predecessors such as lithography and photography, which originated from an artistic as well as a mechanical urge for perfect representation, the photocopy was not conceived in any way as a tool for artists...

...The price paid for the factual reproduction of reality was termed 'the loss of the aura' by Walter Benjamin, who in the 1930s meticulously chronicled the extermination of the artistic aura (unique singularity) through mechanical reproduction. According to Benjamin, 'the dynamite of the tenth of a second' in photography and film blew away traditional notions of art appreciation as contemplative fetishism. If we extend Benjamin's chronology to the present day, then photocopying and video can be seen as successors in the 1980s to photography and film. Yet our present vantage point also permits us to advance beyond Benjamin's verdict on the aura and to see our destruction not only as inevitable due to technological progress, but also, in artistic terms, as necessary.'

From Christian Brensing, Refracted Origins, A Brief History of the Photocopy.

Studio News: New work for Delineation exhibition

Viral I (2010)
Graphite on paper
200cm x 150cm

Delineation: Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing opens in October 2010. The exhibition considers drawing as an expanded field that explores what it is to draw within the context of contemporary art practice. In the elegiac setting of The Crypt Gallery, Delineation will present works from TBC Artists' Collective that contemplate the nature of current drawing activity in physical, cognitive and virtual contexts. The exhibition will focus on the processes of drawing itself, and also assert its relevance to writing, sculpture, sewing, technology, mark-making, language, gesture and performance.

27 October 2010 - 31 October 2010
10:00 AM - 6:00 PM
The Crypt Gallery, Euston Road, St Pancras Church, London NW1 2BA