Selections Fall 1996

Selections Fall 1996 was one of a continuing series of Selections exhibitions which brought the work of emerging artists from across the nation and abroad to public attention. All of the artists in Selections Fall 1996 had participated in The Drawing Center's Viewing Program, a service which offered emerging artists an opportunity to present their drawings to the curatorial staff for professional feedback and to be considered for inclusion in an exhibition.

Although many of The Drawing Center's Selections exhibitions are non-thematic, Selections Fall 1996 brought together a group of artists who work with elemental materials, such as water, light, air, and dirt, or with more traditional art materials. such as watercolor and ink. For his installation at The Drawing Center, Ignasi Aballí relied on the subtle but inevitable power of sunlight to bleach, dry, and permanently alter the surface it strikes. Working in his studio in Barcelona, Aballí covers a wall with cardboard which he layers with additional rectangles of the same material. The artist then exposes this construction to sunlight. After a few days of exposure, the uppermost pieces of cardboard were removed, their former placement marked by the unbleached cardboard found beneath. During the exhibition, the differences in tone between the bleached and unbleached areas continued to change. Aballí's installations are always in transition, always dependent upon the fluctuations of light.

Working with more traditional materials, Ginny Bishton slowly builds simple shapes and lines. Her drawings are composed of marks knit close together, often so close that they eventually form a dense single line. Through these abstract works, Bishton frequently creates a visual representation of the body's limits by working with the rule that her marks will extend no further than the length of her arm. Caryl Davis constructs large-scale wall drawings out of mud, representing the areas of negative space around the edges of her body. At The Drawing Center, Davis magnified such a shape so that it took the powerful and even menacing form of a bull's head. Laurie Reid works with water and watercolor, allowing these liquids to soak into the paper, marking it with pathways which chart the movements of these materials. Paper thus altered carries traces, on both front and back, of the water's effects; the side which first received the water often becomes the reverse side of the completed work.