Drawing I, 2016, single-channel video installation.
In a darkened gallery space, the low rumblings of an underwater current
continually rise and fall in a one-minute loop. On the floor, in the center of the
gallery, a video is projected downward onto the surface of a 4x5x2’ platform. As
the sound of water builds, an image of rippling black liquid emerges on the
surface of the platform. Bubbles form and begin to circle (...) The low rumblings
of the underwater current continue to build as small clusters of bubbles spiral on
the inky black surface. The event abruptly shifts. A vortex forms and a drain is
revealed as the liquid is voided. Drawing I fades to a silent blackness, and begins
anew (...)
Drawing I is an unsettling vision, it conjures up an allusion to hydromancy
(the practice of reading signs in the linear patterns formed by moving
bodies of water). Understood as a form of divination one could embrace
this mercurial surface as a sign of the end of days—or one could qualify it as
an articulation of the fears and anxieties that underscore our current era of
rapid technological advancement, global economic disparity, and looming
ecological disaster. And yet the formation of lines in Drawing I are the result
of material forces that have been set in motion. Thus Drawing I is as much a
quasi-charting of futurity as it is an immanent unfolding of elements
which have been suspended in a digital format. As a result, this allusion
prompts a number of disparate questions: Can Drawing I be read as a letting
go or a cathartic casting-out of some bête noire? Could this spectacle be
understood as a post human dissolution of the boundaries between
humanity, nature, and technology? Or, as alluded to earlier, is Drawing I an
engagement with the affective complexities that arise when facing both
the fear and the desire to know what is to come?