November 19 – December 17, 1994

Opening Reception: Saturday, November 19, 6-9pm

Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 12 – 5pm

Juror: Anne Ayres

Southern Exposure’s Fourth Annual Entry fee-Free Juried Exhibition of works by Northern California Artists.

As suits the double meaning of the title Re: Drawing, many of the works in this exhibition reflect upon the activity of drawing itself, while others in fact re-draw through various appropriations of images or styles from popular media. These drawings aren’t about a straightforward engagement with classical drawing values: virtuoso rendering, lyrical line, chiaroscuro contrast, compositional probity, or suave explorations of abstract mark-making and touch. Rather, the drawings of Re: Drawing suggest a complex conversation with supposedly “low” sources: the narrative sequencing of the comics, the scrawls of graffiti writers, the scandalous charm of pornography, the assured shorthand of advertising, the stylized diagrams of catalogs, the puzzling obsessions of outsider art, the unexpected freshness of the childlike. It is left to the viewer to puzzle out sophistication.

 Drawing is often thought of as a direct and expressive encounter with the artist’s psyche. In this exhibition drawing may still be that, but the psyches involved sometimes appear impulsive, guarded, fragmented, and narcissistic. These pieces can be about indirection and masquerade. They create personas that are often unclear; and they challenge certainty concerning outsider idiosyncrasy and art world knowingness, brash insouciance and faux primitive conceit, thumb-your-nose fashionable bad boy/ girl-ism and really inexplicable stop-the-mind images that happily impossible image, line, decision, or concept, I stayed to surrender to the peculiar power of the drawings finally included in Re: Drawing.