Nick Lowe

Drawing is remembering, a deposition, a perspective, one's vision of an object, an image that starts from bias and moves toward accessibility, redrawn and over-written, some parts corrected, others fetishized and still others obliterated or buffed-out leaving only traces behind. The panel mounted drawings in this exhibition employ figures and motifs of cityscapes, gesturally evoking Los Angeles while avoiding iconic identity. This lack of specificity, while still familiar, allows the imagery to exist in a tense state between the particular and the general, a collective unconscious.

Lines create the figures, but the lines are mischievous and misleading and manifold, simultaneously defining volume and filling space, delineating both objects and actions and testing the expressive elasticity of the graphic mark–an excessive exuberance to say the least. Larger scale geometries of flattened color help order the compositions. These elements occupy a shifting middle ground, foregrounding and backgrounding the linear elements. The under painting (a technique not traditionally associated with drawing) refuses to stay in the background and through procedures like erasure float back toward the surface and challenge the reading of the works as drawings and place them on the spectrum of painting.