Archetypewriters

Alison Hall Tamara Gonzales Geoffrey Young Christine Heindl Butt Johnson Scott Ogden Andrea Bergart Nichole van Beek

Curated by Roe Projects

Archetypewriters explores the tension that lies just under and above the surface of a drawing. This charge presents itself both as a draft and as a finished work; wherein one returns to the mind’s drawing board to revisit a new idea, and by necessity comes to re-know it by way of drawing from one's subconscious. And then finally, and yet never quite fully, drawing onto a surface that acts as both a blank slate and a rewriting or revealing of what is already known. The page is a mirror of oneself, and the act of drawing becomes a kinetic reflection and a written verse.

What’s more, the work is an act of writing. It explains itself through a rough scratch of a pencil on a page, or strikes out its original meaning by way of a carefully rendered line through it. The drawing’s intent may not have a definitive origin or endpoint. To the contrary, meaning is made through the movement of the hand operating under a system that knows just enough about where it is going, but not more than it needs to. It’s not a matter of knowing but of ‘doing’ to remember what ‘knowing’ means.

The abstracted drawings in this show, whether drawn loosely or with precision, are true accounts of uncertain spaces within which ideas are at once conceived and uncovered, where mark-making is an act of floating just above the surface and a springing forth from below.

- Robert Otto Epstein, 2016