Selections 23

Selections 23 presented the work of Daisy Craddock, Joseph Goodwin, Renee Green, Heather Holden, Jennifer Krauss, Donald Powley, Scott Sherk, and Rodrigo Shopis. All artists had been selected through The Drawing Center's Artists' Viewing Program. Through this program, artists from all over the country presented original works to Drawing Center staff members either through an individual appointment or by submitting work to the Center's new Open Portfolio Day.

Many of the works in Selections 23 varied considerably from traditionally held concepts of drawing. Scott Sherk's pieces, cut-paper forms placed before a lamp, cast shadows of still lifes and landscapes on the wall. In Heather Holden's work, giant images derived from journalistic sources were painted on pressed synthetic paper. Words, totally unrelated to the image depicted, were superimposed to establish a psychological association. Also working in life size, Renee Green made large paintings on paper which explored romance and attempted to subvert traditional portrayals of relationships between man and woman. The cubist-inspired, monochromatic landscapes of Jennifer Krauss depicted the power of natural phenomena — whirlpools, avalanches, blizzards — as imagined by the artist. Daisy Craddock worked from life, using oil sticks and oil pastel in landscape done on black paper in unnaturalistic colors. Donald Powley juxtaposed hard-edged geometric framing devices with ephemerally painted landscapes in his enigmatic and thought-provoking works.

Joseph Goodwin saw his tiny paintings on paper as abstract, with occasional references to recognizable material completely coincidental and non-intentional. Rodrigo Shopis used an old-fashioned technique — black-and-white cut-paper silhouettes — to render elegant and witty imagery.

An informal symposium in which all the artists in Selections 23 discussed their work and answered questions from the audience took place Wednesday, December 7, 1983, at 7:30 p.m.