Joëlle Tuerlinckx: Drawing Inventory

In her first New York exhibition, the contemporary Belgian artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx (born 1958) worked on site at The Drawing Center to create a project that drew, indexed, and reported the measurements and scale of The Drawing Center's main gallery space. Lengths of thread, masses of confetti, elastic bands, rolls of paper, and areas of light projection became tools for the artist to trace her experience of the space.

Curated by Catherine de Zegher, Executive Director, and Katherine Carl, Curator of Contemporary Exhibitions, Tuerlinckx's installation was founded on an unconventional combination of materials taken from the immediate environment. The artist re-drew the main gallery by marking, erasing, and re-tracing the identifying lines, volumes, and processes of the space. Through what Tuerlinckx called her Stretch Drawings—which developed through prolonged video projections—she extended this vision to include new layouts for the gallery. In her extensive working process, Tuerlinckx culls and arranges generic objects in ways that address and consciously expand methods of drawing. The artist's installations often resemble archaeological sites that overflow with materials categorized according to multiple associations. Working on the floor or on large tables, she displays an inventory of objects such as wooden sticks, Styrofoam balls, stacks of doilies, and Post-it notes, meticulously arranged to bring out qualities of line, shape, texture, hue, and spatial relationships that are usually overlooked in everyday life. Her constellations of marks reconsider the roles and functions of collecting, preserving, and exhibiting within art institutions.

In conjunction with the exhibition, The Drawing Center published Drawing Papers 59, featuring images of the artist's work and essays by Jaleh Mansoor and Michael Newman.