Selections 36

The Drawing Center celebrated its tenth anniversary with Selections 36, a group exhibition of new work by nine emerging artists. Included in Selections 36 were: Craig Buckbee, Kwang Yeop Cheon, Kate Delos, Trudi Hirsch, Shelagh Keeley, Janis Krasnow, Margery Mellman, Tina Mochon, and Miriam Smith. The artists represented had been chosen through The Drawing Center's unique Viewing Program, which offered artists the opportunity to present their work to a member of the curatorial staff in a personal interview or to drop off work for consideration on Mondays, Open Portfolio Day. All of the artists shown in The Drawing Center's Selections exhibitions had participated in these programs.

Using pre-Christian funerary portraits as a source of inspiration, Kate Delos investigated the conventions associated with portraiture. Tina Mochon's humorous watercolors depicting the adventures of a robot explored the area between cartoon and fine art. While Margery Mellman's vibrantly colored drawings may have appeared abstract, they actually depicted specific people, places and events. Janis Krasnow's enigmatic black-and-white gouaches focused on fragmentary gestures and incidental bits and pieces of reality.

Shelagh Keeley's wax and ink abstractions were based on an old German anatomy text and took as a starting point isolated bones and body parts. Miriam Smith's large landscape-inspired abstractions were torn paper collages overpainted with black, white and gray acrylic paint. In contrast Trudi Hirsch's tiny collages relied on the juxtaposition of glossy magazine images to create a new distinct reality. Kwang Yeop Cheon's monumental mixed media drawings combined acrylic, tempera, charcoal and pastel with modeling paste to build a dense physical surface. Craig Buckbee investigated the realm of shadow, reflection and spatial depth through the use of a sensuous layered surface.

All the artists in Selections 36 participated in a symposium Wednesday, February 4 at 7:00 p.m. The artists discussed their work and answered questions from the audience.