Selections Fall 2003: Internal Excess

Featuring works by fourteen artists selected through the Center's Viewing Program, Internal Excess was designed to offer several conceptual understandings of interior spaces that included the corporeal and the architectural as well as the immaterial and metaphysical. The included drawings provided alternatives for imagining the interior not merely as a retreat into an insular physical space, but also for locating oneself in relation to the external world. In unique ways, each artist offered a means of interface between the protected interior and the reality of the outside world.

Inspired by sources as varied as Renaissance fresco and Islamic architecture, Jeff Konigsberg (Brooklyn, NY) transformed The Drawing Room by carving into wallboard, creating works both in and upon the wall. Lorella Di Cintio (Toronto, Canada) literally dug into the gallery walls in an excavation-like process, revealing the sedimentation of many layers of paint beneath the surface and offering an intimate view of The Drawing Center's historical strata. In contrast, Christine Hiebert (Brooklyn, NY) used the wall as a muse and medium to create an ideal concept of a literal and metaphoric home. Arthur Aghajanian (Los Angeles, CA) created drawings initially resembling blueprints of lifeless interiors of newly developed homes. Upon closer inspection, however, his drawings (in a similar vein to reality television) were actually violations of the sanctioned privacy of the domestic sphere. The colorfully saturated nature of Lamar Peterson's (New York, NY) drawings obscured neurosis. After prolonged viewing, however, his funhouse-like renderings of the day-to-day interactions of the family took on a sinister edge.

Astrid Bowlby (Philadelphia, PA) created installations of black ink cut-out drawings of utensils and other objects, imploding the orderliness of domesticity and the superficiality of the well-kept home. Kristine Robinson (Brooklyn, NY) used her home as a point of departure to draw a dream-world punctuated by pop culture references and associations. Similarly, Alix Delmas (Paris, France) used variations of domestic space and all its accoutrements to create incongruous associations—at once humorous, erotic, and ironic. Christina Mancuso (Jersey City, NJ) presented a video challenging the codes of feminine domesticity, weaving in the work a flowery trail into her palm with a needle and thread, eliciting a squeamishness similar to that provoked by the works of Abigail Lazkoz (Bilbao, Spain). Her wall drawings utilized allegorical images as projections of inner anxieties and attendant terrors. The color-saturated drawings of Mie Yim (New York, NY) presented sweet and sinister teddy bears and rabbits cavorting or playing naughtily in surrealist landscapes. Jeanne Lorenz (Canyon, CA) also found inspiration in the kitschy objects of the suburban home by infusing life into her renderings of one-eyed lamps and faux-porcelain animals. Douglas Florian (New York, NY) merged mundane with cosmic in his series of colorful and playful renderings of organic forms informed by the kabbalah. The beautifully crafted trees of Yuken Teruya (Brooklyn, NY), formed from fast-food paper bags, pointed to the continuous transformation of the interior by external forces in a process that was always becoming.