Wall Drawings 1996

Wall Drawings 1996 was one of a continuing series of exhibitions at The Drawing Center which brought the work of emerging artists from across the nation and abroad to public attention. All of the artists in Wall Drawings 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.

Two of the artists in the exhibition, Barry McGee from San Francisco and Mark Dean Veca from New York, created large-scale murals working in styles based on refined and inventive interpretations of graffiti art and cartoons. McGee, who has completed numerous murals for both interior and exterior spaces, populates his works with figures which range from the comic to the melancholy. Around these images circulate others of urban detritus floating through a surface marked by "tags" (the graffiti artist's signature), abstract scribbles, and gestures. Using Popeye's exaggerated form as a starting point, Mark Dean Veca enlarged and mutated particular features, such as an arm or mushroom-shaped hat. Appropriated and altered, these elements suggested sexual and gendered subtexts in the Popeye narrative. Using words and catch phrases, Tania Mouraud creates large-scale wall drawings which heighten the awareness of the viewer's position in relation to his or her perceptual environment. At The Drawing Center, Mouraud selected the phrase "What you see is what you get" (on loan from the Centre Pompidou, Paris) and elongated the letters of this figure-of-speech so that they expanded to the full height and width of the wall. Through this elongation, Mouraud rendered her chosen phrase nearly illegible; the concrete became ambiguous and abstract.