Marking Time: Contemporary Wall Drawings

The exhibition Marking Time: Contemporary Wall Drawings featured the work of four artists. Jacob El Hanani’s all-over compositions were created out of thousands of minute, repeated lines, dots, and squiggles. The artist used a very fine Rapidograph pen, creating grids of fluid patterns that sometimes would play tricks on one’s eyes. Professor Joshua Halberstam from the Department of Philosophy at Long Island University wrote of El Hanani's work, saying "For here it is precisely in the details that discoveries are to be attained; it is in the details that technique becomes object. The subject matter of these drawings is finally, the process by which it evolves, proclaiming the minute stroke, the barely visible cut, the nuanced nick, the scratch."

For the exhibition, Nancy Rubins presented monumental sculptures which were made out of such American consumer cast-offs as mobile homes and domestic appliances, molding them into towering cyclones. She drew on the sculptures and walls, ripping down walls to incorporate them in her drawings. For years up until this point, she had produced graphite drawings like those seen in the exhibition, the drawings typically layered on top of and partially concealing each other, producing entropic, precarious heaps held together with pushpins. Working on the floor, Rubins let drawings pile up, much as they do in the finished installations. The dirt and debris on the floor, along with the irregularities of the artist’s own random pencil strokes, created variations that at times would evoke an illusion of depth. While the countless individual lines were discernible, hinting at the labor involved in creating these congested surfaces, Rubins said that the works were not about marking time per se, though she “knows how many batches of pencils [she goes] through.”

At the time of this exhibition, John A. Reilly had been working on his spiritual and physical drawings series for 12 years, while also working as a furniture specialist for architectural design firms. While Reilly often worked from preparatory sketches, he allowed “divine intuition” to intercede during the execution. He used black Design Markers, letting the dots bleed, and often rubbing them with his hand to produce apparent variations in color from sepia to blue, green, and purple. In the physical series he made an initial dot and spiraled out from there. While the artist intended no specifically representational images, faces, waves, galaxies, and large abstract patterns would emerge. As hung in the gallery, the two series existed side-by-side, with an overlapping “marriage” of one work from each series, reflecting Reilly’s desire to fuse opposites. Reilly spoke on the time it took to produce his work, saying he would “[start] at the beginning and [finish]” when it felt right.

Angela Bulloch created semi-interactive kinetic sculptures using blinking lights, soundtracks, and other machinery coded with seemingly random programs equipped to respond to the viewer’s movements. In one work, installed in an empty space, modulating track lighting paused and began again at the closing and opening of the door to the room; others emitted repetitive “Yes” and “No” and “Maybe” tracks when viewers sat on special chairs. Much of Bulloch’s work played on polarities: on/off, yes/no, light/dark, and horizontal/vertical. Bulloch relied on a minimalist armature of mechanical and electronic devices, often with the wires left exposed. While they may have sounded coolly technological, critics compared the pulsing sounds to breathing and heartbeats, with human interference disruptting their set programming.