Studio Views: White Noise

Completed work in the studio

Today work was completed on a new drawing in the series Signal to White Noise Ratio. The piece is a intricate rendering of the visual interference generated by repeatedly photocopying the same image, in this case a small, hand-drawn graphite square. The work is executed in graphite on paper and measures 120 x 120 cm.

Top: Signal to White Noise Ratio (2011)  / Below: Signal to White Noise Ratio (Detail)

Sketches

 

Compositional study for Xerox Drawing series.

Cut tracing paper and light. 

 

White on White (Erased)

Pencil crayon on paper

Supporting study for Xerox Drawing series

Graphite on layered tracing paper

8x8 Squares, Partially Erased
Graphite on paper


Today work in the studio has continued with supporting studies and material explorations in advance of work on a new Xerox Drawing. The forthcoming exhibition Delineation, Contemporary Dialogues with Drawing will feature an area of artists' diagnostic drawings.

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