I love drawing. I preface this review with that statement to acknowledge my own biases. Markmaking feels like an innate human characteristic. I often link drawing with the practice of writing by hand because they fulfill similar primal urges; the need to move some abstract mental something through the transformative process of being born into the material plane. The urgent desire to fill the physical page. A prime assertion of being, witnessing.
I’ve suffered a suspicion that there exists a flippant dismissal of drawing in the larger context of art and art history. It has long been treated as a marginal activity, a preparatory step toward higher art like painting or sculpture, rather than a practice with its own authority. The amorphous category of “works on paper” is understood to be sold at a lower price point than paintings for reasons that shift and turn like a labyrinthine Rubik’s Cube. This is reinforced by academic institutional hierarchies, which often don’t offer a formal drawing degree, preferring to lump the practice into foundational courses or a painting curriculum. They are a means to a larger realization, and don’t you dare think of using childish tools like colored pencils.
And yet hundreds of visitors flock to the floral drawings of Hilma af Klint, sighing as we trace our minds over her handwriting. She touched this paper just as she touched all of her paintings, but in a different way. It’s like flipping over a photograph in a family album to find your grandmother’s handwriting. To encounter a drawing is often to encounter an artist directly; their hand, their hesitation, their mistakes, their eraser. To me, every drawing is a Ouija Board.
This quality of presence was at the heart of Drawn to the Moment, a pop-up exhibition organized by Immaterial Projects, an emerging voice within the Bushwick art scene. Curated by Immaterial Projects members Tracie Lee and Pilar Lagos, the exhibition featured works by Catherine Chen, Srishti Dass, Isa Dorvillier, Joshua Drayzen, Polly Fossey, Michael Miller, Himeka Murai, January Shi, Gabriel Slavitt, and Alex Wolkowicz, all beneath the umbrella of drawing. Instead of a permanent exhibition space, the show was held within Sidetime Studios, a printmaking studio on Varet St. “It’s important to us to find alternative venues because we believe it’s a great way to activate and connect the community,” Lee asserted. In short, “exhibitions are fun… but there are other ways to organize and strengthen connections.” Lee and Lagos invited artists to expand their understanding of drawing beyond graphite and charcoal, and instead tied the show together through the medium of attention. The works share a devotion to slowing down and lingering in the act of looking; a drawing out of time.
Consider the work of Brooklyn artist Himeka Murai, whose studio practice has circled themes of memory, time, and a sense of place. Murai’s piece Soft Scaffold is a structure of hot-glue threaded through soil, picking up branches and leaves as time and plastic freeze and harden around them. Soft Scaffold feels like a spell, a time-lapse of a long finger weaving through sand and soil, accidental dowsing rods stuck in their path. Or perhaps a breeze or a spider or a child’s gaze (without occult intentions) looping and sticking together other breezeway travelers. In this way, Murai’s work rests heavily on a core principle of drawing, the art of long and intentional noticing.
Similarly, Queens-based Isa Dorvillier presents a monotype on quilted muslin that speaks to the cultural and ecological histories of urbanized bodies of water in New York City. In Dorvillier’s single contribution, Bathers, bobbing heads poke above watery waves that flick up and out like blades of grass, bleeding into the background of industrial mechanization from which smudges of exhaust stream from the distorted face of a train. A monotype in a printmaking studio turned exhibition space seems normal enough, but what strikes me is the physicality of the mark, with a kind of feathered and utilitarian confidence that feels like handwriting in a journal.
At the center of the exhibition was a table covered in butcher-block paper that carried small vignettes by several artists. The format was humble, even familiar to those who have endured art school critiques, but it underscored something I had not considered: the simultaneous preciousness and commonness of a work of art. Among these pieces were risograph reproductions by Polly Fossey, drawn from her sketchbooks kept during overseas travels. Their everyday immediacy, life observed in passing, reproduced with the democratic flatness of risograph, turned casual drawings into artifacts of sustained attention. Fossey’s work reminded me how easily a sketch can slip between the ordinary and the extraordinary, from private to public.
To lean over the table was to lean into this paradox. Hands behind your back, you peer as if at a beautiful necklace in a jewelry store, or conversely, as if pointing out gelato flavors to a friend, repeating the funny names of house specials. “Oh, look at that one!” you whisper, bending closer, marveling. Each drawing is a creamy, shining gem to be cooed over. In that slow moment of whispered looking, I felt most that I was honoring myself and my own presence as a viewer. Because drawing is precious and also “everyday” in its accessibility. For most of the artists in Drawn to the Moment, there’s no magic trick, just a single moment within the breath of their own lives.
What emerged from Drawn to the Moment was a recognition that drawing is its own radical practice in presence for both the artist and us, the viewer. The artists brought together by Lagos and Lee, and the greater Immaterial Projects team, remind us that we are closer to one another than we imagine. At some point, the artist tightly peered at her work, as you are. At some point, the artist stepped back and considered, as you are. You can make that same mark. Imagine how it would feel to do so. I’m sorry, I really must end this article. I have to go draw.