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 spectacle, 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?