DRAWING MEANING:

RECORDING DETAIL AND MAPPING ACCUMULATIONS

by

Jillian Taylor

A Statement in Support of Thesis Exhibition Submitted to the Faculty of

The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Fine Arts

Florida Atlantic University

Boca Raton, Florida

May 2011
 DRAWING MEANING:

RECORDING DETAIL AND MAPPING ACCUMULATIONS

by

Jillian Taylor

This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Carol
Prusa, Department of Visual Arts and Art History, and has been approved by the
members of her supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the College of
Arts and Letters and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of Master of Fine Arts.

SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE:

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Carol Prusa, M.F.A.
Thesis Advisor

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WaJA~
Walter Hnatysh, M.F.A.

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Linda Johnson, M.~
Chair, Department of Visual Arts and Art History

tD~ -
Dean, Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters

9":7: T ~~---
Barry T. Rosson, Ph.D.
Dean, Graduate College

11
 ABSTRACT

Author: Jillian Taylor

Title: Drawing Meaning: Recording Detail and Mapping Accumulations

Institution: Florida Atlantic University

Thesis Advisor: Carol Prusa

Degree: Master of Fine Arts

Year: 2011

With the commitment of a nineteenth century objectivist scientist, I established a

rigorous methodology in my studio practice through drawing, cutting and sorting that

asserts meticulous attention to and recording of detail. This resulted in an overwhelming

accumulation of components – pieces of information that no longer functioned to create

the “whole.” Interested in how information adds up to meaning, I am preoccupied with

sorting out meaning from my accumulations. With each work, I create a map that works

less to mark a destination than to structure a journey. No longer “lost” in the details, these

accumulated works effect a “whole,” where the inflection of my hand in each discreet

decision I made adds up to marking my place. This offers the viewer the possibility that

asserting one’s place is meaning enough.

iii
 DRAWING MEANING:

RECORDING DETAIL AND MAPPING ACCUMULATIONS

List of Figures......................................................................................................................v

List of Plates.......................................................................................................................vi

Introduction..........................................................................................................................1

Studio Process......................................................................................................................12

Plates..................................................................................................................................27

Notes..................................................................................................................................37

Bibliography......................................................................................................................40

Further Readings................................................................................................................42

iv
 FIGURES

Figure 1. Arthur Worthington’s drawings of water drop splashes.......................................4

Figure 2. Views of Agnes Martin painting, as part of Krauss’s /cloud/ model

Figure 2.1 Close-up viewing distance............................................................................8

Figure 2.2 Mid-distance view...................................................................................8

Figure 2.3 Farthest viewing distance........................................................................8

Figure 3. Acquiesce 1 (detail), 2006, graphite on paper, 22 x 15 inches, from BFA series .........12

Figure 4. Residuum, 2008, graphite and cut drafting vellum, dimensions variable ........13

Figure 5. Detail of shredded paper “map,” 2010............................................................14

Figure 6. Configurations of Sorted components in studio

Figure 6.1 Initial configuration of drawings installed directly on walls in studio.......18

Figure 6.2 Second configuration drawings, intended to be more clearly “followed”..........19

Figure 6.3 Third configuration of drawings installed on wall, beginning to be

reduced to fewer pieces to emphasize certain groupings.......................................19

Figure 7. Julie Mehretu, Stadia II, 2007.....................................................................22

Figure 8. Marco Maggi, 2010, Vertical Carousel, detail, drypoint on aluminum

in 80 side mounts, 8.5 inch diameter.................................................................23

Figure 9. Detail of Janine Magelssen’s installation at The Drawing Center.....................25

Figure 10. Anne Lindberg, motion drawing 05, 2009, graphite on cotton board,

28 x 34 inches...............................................................................................................25

v
 PLATES

Plate I. Delineation, 2011. Graphite and cut lines on paper and vellum................................. 27

Plate II. Delineation (detail 1), 2011................................................................................. 28

Plate III. Delineation (detail 2), 2011................................................................................28

Plate IV. Sorted components, 2011. Installation shot in Dorothy F. Schmidt Gallery..... 29

Plate V. Sorted components 1, 2011. Cut paper and aluminum foil on graph paper,

18 x 24 inches...................................................................................................... 30

Plate VI. Sorted components 2, 2011. Graphite, acrylic, cut paper, colored pencil

and graph paper, 24 x 36 inches......................................................................... 31

Plate VII. Sorted componensts 2 (detail), 2011................................................................. 31

Plate VIII. Sorted components 3 (detail), 2011. Cut paper and graphite on graph paper,

24 x 18 inches.................................................................................................. 32

Plate IX. Sorted components 4, 2011. Graphite, colored pencil, cut paper

and graph paper, 24 x 36 inches......................................................................... 33

Plate X. Sorted components 4 (detail), 2011..................................................................... 33

Plate XI. Sorted components 5, 2011. Graphite, cut paper, tape, and graph paper,

36 x 46 inches......................................................................................................................34

Plate XII. Sorted components 5 (detail 1), 2011............................................................... 35

Plate XIII. Sorted components 5 (detail 2), 2011.............................................................. 36

vi
 INTRODUCTION

With the commitment of a nineteenth century objectivist scientist, I established a

rigorous methodology in my studio practice through drawing, cutting and sorting that

asserts meticulous attention to and recording of detail. This resulted in an overwhelming

accumulation of components – pieces of information that no longer functioned to create

the “whole.” Interested in how information adds up to meaning, I am preoccupied with

sorting out meaning from my accumulations. With each work, I create a map that works

less to mark a destination than to structure a journey. No longer “lost” in the details, these

accumulated works effect a “whole,” where the inflection of my hand in each discreet

decision I made adds up to marking my place. This offers the viewer the possibility that

asserting one’s place is meaning enough.

A sense of delicacy, intimacy and even fragility overcomes my work through

meticulous, methodical, and refined mark-making and application. Though my process

yields beautiful or aesthetically pleasing results, it is the concepts behind processes and

materials used that drive my work, without envisioning its final appearance. I utilize line

drawing, observational drawing, cutting, and assembling, as they are actions that

represent my desire or need to sift through an abundance of thoughts or information in

order to find meaning within the accumulation. My work is influenced by a range of

references, from eighteenth and nineteenth century scientific studies to Abstract

Expressionism to mapping. I am drawn to topics that deal with our need to feel

1
and understand something or anything, and to get this feeling by looking in even

seemingly insignificant places, and I am informed by others who strive for the same feeling.

My graduate work has been influenced by the approaches, practices, and beliefs

of naturalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before the age of mechanical

reproduction, scientists documented their empirical observations in writing and drawings.

They felt they could satisfy their need to understand their surroundings through unbiased

and completely objective observations. Naturalists strived to explain their findings

through the “scientific method” and reveal answers and logic within our world. Their

observations were specific, meticulous, and minute, knowing seemingly insignificant

details could reveal the answers they were seeking. Without the aid of cameras,

objectivist scientists had only their discerning eyes and dedication to observing and

recording to rely on. In spite of their attempt to remain completely objective while

making observations, the intense processes they often underwent would cloud the larger

picture of what they were trying to resolve. Their intense investigations often revealed

much more about individual scientist’s process and ways of thinking than their findings.

The rigor of their methodology was set up so that they would not overlook anything

through their attention to detail.

From my research of objectivist science, I have been especially influenced by the

fact that investigations can get so meticulous and intense that they can conflate into a

compiling that is abstract and/or confusing. In an account of an eighteenth century

naturalist scientist named Charles Bonnet, his strict adherence to the principles of

objectivity led him to create an extremely detailed account of a specific caterpillar he was

observing. His obsessive and intense description transformed a potentially dry scientific

2
journal recording into a beautiful and poetic interpretation of his observations and

thoughts. It became complicated to make identifications based on his specific writings, as

“the object as a whole shattered into a mosaic of details, and even the tiniest insect organ

loomed monstrously large.”1 The resulting assemblage of detailed components left him

not with answers but with confusion. His need to understand something on such an

intimate level left him to be confounded by the whole. He was lost in the details.

This anecdote, among my readings on eighteenth and nineteenth century

observational atlases, has “loomed monstrously large” in my mind. It captured an idea

that I am constantly dwelling on – how tiny components can come together to offer some

greater meaning. Some objectivist scientists were fearful of new recording technology

because they feared it might render them useless. It seems peculiar that a scientist would

not want to embrace current technology, such as photography, to give him/her unbiased

documentation. From exploring this through my studio practice, I see the desire to strictly

adhere to one’s observations over a camera’s as one’s need to exert control over his/her

world, and in turn, exert his/her own existence and purpose. Through my studio

investigations I found that direct observation and recording by drawing reveals the

“hand” of the maker; the subject being observed is secondary. In my art-making process,

I am more concerned with the processes I employ than with the outcome or with

producing an image. The process of my recording through drawing, cutting and pasting is

more important than the subject being observed.

In a series of drawings,2 (Fig. 1) British physicist, Arthur M. Worthington, drew

several renditions of a water drop splashing. Though his observations of a drop of water

were proven to be inaccurate once photography could record at a shorter time scale, in

3
spite of his belief that he was being “true to nature,” he could not help but let his

predictions cloud his judgment. I find it fascinating that I identify with his obsessive

drive and dedication to his beliefs and his work. This has led me to question the validity

of the role of a hardworking, careful, and deliberate individual if the outcome of his/her

hard work only seems to negate it. I apply this question to my work, as I am more

concerned with the processes I employ, rather than with recognizable image-making. By

taking an approach inherently doomed to failure, I pose this question to myself and to

viewers, while hoping that the diligent and rigorous methodology applied is what holds

meaning.

Fig. 1 Arthur Worthington’s drawings of water drop splashes.

4
 My work is quite reductive, and though the non-objective formal elements of my

work could generate the assumption that I am driven by Minimalist goals, I use formal

elements as a vehicle for my conceptual and metaphorical concerns. Because of this, I

have been greatly influenced not by minimalism, but by the minimalist-resembling work

of, more rightly named Abstract Expressionist, Agnes Martin. Often inaccurately labeled

as a Minimalist simply because of her work’s appearance, Martin strived to communicate

emotion, calmness, or revelation through her paintings and drawings. She believed that

art did not have to use imagery to express emotion. She instead wanted to create a feeling

with her work, not an image that makes a viewer think about a feeling. In a review of her

work, the emotions she put forth, in striking contrast to Abstract Expressionists such as

Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko, overwhelms with “an air of sheer insistence; of

uncommon patience.”3 It is this patience and restraint that seems to get her labeled as a

Minimalist, though she rejected the “doctrinaire anonymity”4 of the movement. “Her

work wasn’t about doing away with personality but about reducing it to its smallest

integer.”5 She utilized grids and horizontal bands of washes of paint and thin, hand-

drawn pencil lines. Martin’s slow and deliberate lines applied in such a repetitious and

habitual manner speaks to a haptic approach in which she slowly explores and feels her

way across her surface with a careful hand. It is this slow and searching action of her

wanting to feel her way through her work that makes the viewer get a feeling when

viewing her work. Richard Tuttle, friend and fellow artist, said that she was “extremely

sensitive to the actual event of making a line,”6 which is evident in her work.

Furthermore, Tuttle explains, “in her work, line takes over […] and becomes a vehicle for

the most tender expressions.”7 Her work provides a confounding juxtaposition of tangible

5
and certainly tactile materials and methods—the line, washes of paint, and linen, canvas,

and paper whose textures become an integral component of her compositions—with an

end result of an ethereal and illusory, barely-there, object. In creating grids of lines,

Martin’s “real interest lay in the moment where those lines ended: that inexact place

where meaning happens, where the tiny imprecisions of lifting a pen from a piece of

paper stand in for a world of art-making.”8 Most significantly, “Her pictures aren’t

metaphors but metonyms, not representations of her life but its embodiment.”9

She did use a grid, which also contributed to her mislabel as a Minimalist, as a

foundation for her work. Minimalism embraced the grid because it could reduce

everything to equal parts, with no part being more important than another, the sum not

adding up to more than its parts, and thus produce anonymity. Martin seemed to have

different motivation for embracing the grid. Her grids have been described as “maps,

calculations of the spaciousness of spirit.”10 Martin discussed the grid as a way to

express that everything of importance resides in the intervals of grids, and that the infinite

resides in the smallest components.11 I too employ grids in my work; I do not hand-draw

them, but rather use various graphing papers. To Martin, the grid is a place where things

can be balanced and where things can be contemplated. I use the grid to express my

desire for my “sortings,” or studio process investigations, to find location in an organized

and balanced place. The mere use of graph paper implies that I am hoping to figure

something out of my repetitious, laborious, yet seemingly futile markings because that is

the standard use graph paper has. Martin’s drawings have been described as “a space of

contemplation, of immateriality, and yet it is also a space of labor, repetitive and

meticulous labor.” 12 In the instance of Martin’s work, she makes the grids. Therefore,

6
the grid has already been put forth, and I use already existing grids in which, through

repetitive labor and decisions, make materials and drawings exist. And while some parts

of my drawings seem to flawlessly work with their gridded spaces, other areas resist the

grid, or even seem to ignore it.

Though I create tangible forms out of tangible means (line drawing, cutting,

assembling) using tangible materials (paper, graphite, paint), the result feels ambiguous,

abstract, and even intangible. Because I create drawings with this function, I relate to

Rosalind Krauss’s account of the /cloud/ 13 effect of Martin’s work. (Fig. 2.1, 2.2, and

2.3) Krauss, disappointed with most previous analyses of Martin’s work, claiming them

to be “exceedingly superficial and repetitive”14 was taken with the explanation of critic

Kasha Linville, regarded as one of the best accounts of what it is like to experience an

Agnes Martin painting, which states the paintings are “sequences of illusions of texture

that change as viewing distance changes.”15 In Linville’s account of the work, there is

first the “close-up” reading, in which the viewer notices the nuances of the material used

and the artist’s hand—the dots and dashes and variation in the graphite lines, the surface

of the gesso, and the irregularity of the ground—a reading that gives the viewer a sense

of tangibility of a flat object right in front of him/her. Then there is an experience of the

work from a mid-distance, where something surprisingly illusionistic takes over and the

concrete materiality of her work goes away. Linville describes this response at this

viewing distance as atmospheric, but more importantly, that the painting “feels like,

rather than looks like atmosphere.”16 Martin is not concerned with creating

7
 Fig. 2.1 Agnes Martin, Flowers in the Wind, 1963. Oil on canvas, 75 x 75 inches.

Close-up view of Agnes Martin painting, as part of Krauss’s /cloud/ model.

Fig. 2.2 and 2.3 Mid-distance view and farthest viewing distance of Martin’s painting.

8
interpretations of what is visually perceptible, but to visually and tangibly manifest the

emotion of something abstract. Finally, as Linville puts it, there is a third viewing point,

one even further than the previous, and the feeling of atmosphere turns “opaque,”17 an

effect intended to “make her paintings impermeable, immovable as stone,”18 a striking

contrast to what only moments ago was an experience with a transient emotion. My

drawings function much the same way. At a mid-distance from my drawings, they feel

ephemeral, and their puzzling vagueness causes the viewer to question what is being

viewed. Up close to my work, my hand can be seen and the realization that I have labored

over them becomes evident, and the work is transformed into tangible but delicate pieces

of paper, graphite lines, cut-outs, and collaged paper remnants. At the furthest viewing

distance, my drawings declare themselves as more permanent; they are definitively

framed or assertively pinned to the wall and house almost imperceptible information,

which invites viewers to look more closely and then again more closely.

The idea of mapping has been a large influence in my work. While “map” has

many definitions to explain it as a diagrammatic representation of land, roads, stars,

DNA, or other spatial arrangements, I am concerned with “mapping” as marking points

that logically sort out findings into a coherent system that can then help to understand

something that may not be apparent when looking at individual marks. In moments of

confusion, I seek answers by constructing logical systems of activity that will allow me to

see more clearly. From a collection of essays titled You are Here, one writer extracts a

concept he calls “orientating” from mapping, which seems to quite accurately describe

my art-making process. He uses this term to refer to places, moments, and information

9
that are accumulated, and questions about one’s current location are asked based on this

accumulation.19

The labor that goes into my work parallels the labor that goes into a map. Maps

work to provide information in a logical way. In Denis Wood’s book The Power of Maps,

he argues for the work that maps exert, proclaiming that, “they operate effectively. They

work, that is… they don’t fail. […] But of course, to do this, maps must work in other

ways as well, that is, they toil, that is, labor. Maps sweat, they strain, they apply

themselves.”20 My maps work hard. They bring together bits of information and

observations, reduced to certain bits that seem to have a connection to or echo other

pieces with the hope that they can work together to reveal importance in a larger picture.

However, the ambiguous and remnant feeling that my ‘maps’ present abstract a specific

reading rather than clarify; by Wood’s definition, my maps fail. While not working to

provide clarification into what is being studied, my maps “work” by revealing that

meaning resides in the act of the labor itself. The “labor” that a map performs is reflected

in all the meticulous labor that goes into making my work. It is represented on two levels:

First, with the actual materials (mundane, paper remnants, envelope liners, graph paper)

and obsessive processes (sorting, observing, drawing, cutting, organizing), and second,

metaphorically, that these remnant materials and intricate processes often go unnoticed,

unrewarded, commenting on the role of the committed maker. The inconclusive working

of my maps could point to the futility of this role, but their care, consideration, and quiet

aesthetic presence is honoring it. Because I am presenting information, it seems

reasonable that an answer can be deduced from following it. The lack of clarity to how it

works, or perhaps, that it doesn’t work how one might expect a map to work, causes me

10
to lean in closer to my work – as if, somehow, if I try hard enough, it will make sense.

The path will meet a destination. An answer will be given. I was taken by a passage from

Shelby Foote’s history of the Civil War when he describes Robert E. Lee’s strategy at

Chancelloisville in 1863: [Lee] “kept peering at a map spread on his knees; he peered so

intently, indeed, that he seemed to be trying to make it give him information which it did

not contain.”21

11
 STUDIO PROCESS

Carrying my ideas from my BFA “thesis” work focused on intimate and intensive

drawings into the MFA program, I began deepening my investigation around a concept of

containment, or what it means to be contained. I made drawings using unfolded box

forms as a metaphor for opening restrictive boundaries while retaining the memory of the

potential to contain. (Fig. 3) While I continued to pursue the concept of containment

within my work, I experimented with different materials and methods. I proceeded to

play with materials and different approaches and compositions, from scattering small

drawings within a large paper ground to box forms repetitiously cut from a fragile paper

skin, to large-scale collaged paintings. The process of testing a variety of methods and

materials opened my work up to a new set of vocabulary and concepts, and,

unintentionally but logically back to drawing.

Fig. 3 Detail: Acquiesce 1, 2006, graphite on paper, 22 x 15 inches, from BFA series.

12
 As a result of these initial investigations, my work resolved to investigate how I

record decisions I make. More interested in learning from the rigorous process I employ

than expressing an idea, I set up installations utilizing the remnants of previous activities

– specifically, the parts remaining after cutting out box-forms from drafting paper and

vellum. (Fig. 4) After assembling layers of sheets fragile paper fragments, I noted the

map-like quality of the assemblage, as if it has some kind of coded information to be

deciphered from these traces left behind. From this investigation, I began making

drawings/collages on panel that were aggregates of the smallest of remnants I had

accumulated, micro-shredded paper. (Fig. 5) I developed a process of sorting the

shredded bits into categories and then “reassembling” them onto a gessoed panel. The

purpose of this was to metaphorically state that the remnants we leave and discard can be

sorted into a new state that, though will never resemble the original state of these traces,

can offer new paths to follow. With this series because I felt I had a clear grasp of my

concept and its importance to me, and I was pleased that they also resembled maps. This

series served to tremendously inform my current work and my research of mapping.

Fig. 4 Residuum, 2008, graphite and cut drafting vellum, dimensions variable.
13
 Fig. 5 Detail of shredded paper “map,” 2010.

After considerable time making and experimenting with this body of work, I

began to question if the work merely “looked” like a map, concerned that the content was

overshadowed by the aesthetics. I began more open experimentation with the bits and

pieces accumulating in my studio, and a practice evolved and resulted in my MFA thesis

exhibition. My thesis exhibition work presents the idea that traces of information,

remnants of past activities dislocated from the “whole,” can be mapped out or studied to

create meaning. My work incorporates conventional drawing with assembled residual

components I have accumulated. The accumulations are small parts of a whole that

belong to a group, where each component offers information too small to resolve back

into the “whole” from which it came.

14
 Through my close investigations, I have deepened my appreciation for precision

and intimacy – particularly in the act of drawing. I learned drawing can include anything

that marks a surface, leaving a trace of a decision, where each mark locates a decision at

a specific moment. Drawing, traditionally a foundation for all other art practices, offers a

unique immediacy. Before photography and other documenting technologies, drawing

from observation was necessary for recording and communicating ideas. Drawing was

favored by Objectivist scientists because of its expediency, but also because it can be

careful and deliberate, allowing them to record information as they saw it. I am drawn to

the immediacy of making mark on paper as well as paper is able to record hours, even

weeks, of my decisions very efficiently. As with the Objectivist scientist, my careful and

deliberate labor reveals more about me, the maker, than the original source of

information.

Though much of my drawing is executed with materials like graphite on paper, I

use cut lines and forms as a medium for drawing as well. Cutting acts as drawing – it still

leaves a line, an edge, a record of decisions made. While drawing is additive, cutting can

subtract, omit, or isolate. I cut paper with an exacto-knife or tiny ceramic blade,

instruments as precise and capable of creating lines as a pencil, to remove material from

its original source, to transplant it to another location, or to remove information.

Consciously deciding to leave something out is the same as adding it. The omissions I

make by cutting away areas of drawings are visible and still serve as a record of making

the decision to omit. In Delineation (Plate I), an assemblage of observational line

drawings, I directly reference the activity and intensity of drawing itself by cutting away

15
and noting areas that did not fit into the “whole.” These “omissions” now function as part

of the whole.

Omissions made by cutting not only produce their existence, they produce

remnants of what was being omitted. These decisions leave traces not as pencil lines, but

as remnants. I sort, organize, and rearrange these remnants into new structures. The act of

assembling remnants reflects my preoccupation with searching through traces left by my

decisions to learn what they now mean. By using the remnants in my drawings, I am

giving them meaning, a purpose to function in a system of present decisions. My current

drawing process results in work that functions like a map, presenting information that

follows rules I determine and can be deciphered.

I work very meticulously, and often work with tiny components to build a larger

scale. The intimacy of my focus allows me to labor over each individual decision made.

The resulting precision of my work directs the viewer to feel a specificity of purpose, an

indication of meaning. At initial glance, it might appear there is no recognizable

information within my drawings. My work is resistant to easy reading as the components

and repetitious activity that decisively accumulates them never resolves into a

recognizable whole but, instead, creates something never put together that way before.

My obsession with analyzing minute and ostensibly unimportant details mirrors

the objective efforts of eighteenth and nineteenth century naturalists. Their intense

investigations of the most mundane specimens were a practice of “calculated self-

deception that would become self-fulfilling.”22 Essentially, they were satisfying their

need for something to hold their attention by practicing with the mundane and minute:

“By looking long and hard enough at maggots as if they were marvels, naturalists came to

16
believe heart and soul that they were.”23 I allow myself to get lost in repetitive markings

and cuttings, the intricacies of a computer-generated envelope pattern, or complex

weavings of a pile of paper scraps, believing they are “marvels,” and by observing

closely enough and with total dedication and attention, they will reveal some previously

unknown truth for me.

In Sorted components, (Plate IV) I take the recordings of my obsessive

investigations and apply them to a graph paper grid. When one looks at a blank sheet of

graph paper, I imagine some sort of draftsperson sitting before it, about to lay out plans of

some sort, mapping a particular logic or idea. Each rigid square on the paper serves as a

container to house a specific component, and when laid logically in a grid, each

component adds up into something greater than itself. The simple act of placing my

recordings into a grid system conflates the implied meaning of a grid with meaning in my

structure. I have utilized the “sign” of the grid to lead viewers to “read” meaning into my

work. This group of drawings involves graphite marking, tracing, cutting and assembling,

I then determined to treat each resulting drawing/recording as a component in

another system of accumulated decisions. This group of works is a small selection from

many drawings/recordings created through my investigation. After numerous trials of

arranging and rearranging component drawings into groupings, I selected these as

offering relationships that feel meaningful to me. I experimented first with adhering the

drawings directly to the wall, indicative of their tentative presence and to reflect my

constant process of sorting and deciphering. (Fig. 6.1) After living with this orientation in

my studio for a while, I began to feel they read as conventional and decorative in

arrangement, so I tried another arrangement. With this second trial, (Fig. 6.2) I looked for

17
strong visual connections among the drawings and placed them in closer proximity so it

would become more clearly read like a map. The result was something that felt too

contrived. In a third trial, (Fig. 6.3) I removed many of the drawings from the

arrangement, which allowed certain groupings to come forward as having a strong

connection and feel “right” or sensible.

Fig. 6.1 Initial configuration of drawings installed directly on walls in studio.

18
Fig. 6.2 Second configuration drawings on wall, intended to be more clearly “followed.”

Fig. 6.3 Third configuration of drawings installed on wall, beginning to be reduced to

fewer pieces to emphasize certain groupings.

19
 The final result after these trials is a series of smaller arrangements isolated by

frames that feel considered and “right.” For example, in this piece from Sorted

Components, (Plate V) I felt a connection, an answer to what I have been sorting out.

Made from a roll of weathered and oxidized aluminum foil, and I was immediately

fascinated with the map-like tracings left behind from water seeping into the roll. I began

tracing, and emphasizing the intricate system of stains with a tiny ceramic blade,

removing the severely weathered areas and leaving a scrap of metal foil that appears as if

it had been corroded to this point. This component is paired with another, independently

made. In the counterpart, I cut strips of a security envelope to follow its printed

curvilinear pattern, and then assembled them onto graph paper. In the process of trying to

arrange and rearrange my accumulation of scrap and graph paper drawings, I noticed an

immediate connection between these two compositions. The patterned shapes cut from

the envelope echo the cut shapes from the foil. This precipitated an unexpected revelation

– that my labor and decisions do add up to create meaning and that is important to me.

As I work with components of information, irrevocably separated from their

original meaning, I realized that through intensive engagement, rigorously following a

logic of my own making, I create new forms and meaning.

Having been driven by repetitive process, sorting and resorting, I found it difficult

to accept anything as finished. I “fixed” decisions at the tiny, repeated component/mark

scale but had left “open” the resulting larger components to endlessly play with

connections amongst all the pieces piling up in my studio. Realizing that my work could

ultimately add up into something greater than the labor that made it, I determined to

signify my work as resolved by employing the convention of a frame. I had been working

20
in a way in which I temporarily affix component drawings to a wall, knowing that I could

visit it the next day and change it. Moving my work from a constant state of flux into a

fixed decision feels risky, but I can appreciate that commitment creates location.

Mapping, as it applies to our understanding of people’s current location and

situation, is a theme being actively explored by contemporary artists. Our information

culture seems to drive artists to explore sorting complex systems. Contemporary artist

Julie Mehretu abstracts literal maps, diagrams, and architectural imagery to create

paintings that “map” complex social or political networks. (Fig. 7) Her paintings abstract

different complexes of information in layers and original sources become confounded.

Mehretu states she does not try to make “rational descriptions” or try to “tell a story.”24

She speaks of her work in terms of “feeling” the marks she makes, which in turn allows

viewers to “read” the mark.25 Though non-objective, her marks are motivated by

political and social situations. For a recent commission for a painting for lower

Manhattan, she mapped an entire history of the development of a capitalist system. Her

development as an artist is marked by “trying to understand systems,”26 not unlike

myself. We share an interest in mapping in order to sift through complexities of

information and generate understanding, yet our motivation and outcomes show the

variety of scale to which this mapping process can be applied. The large scale of her

paintings (some ten feet by fourteen feet), created with the assistance of many studio

employees reflects the scale of the multi-national political systems she is mapping. The

intimate scale of my work reflects my more introspective sorting of information into

systems of individual logic in order to create my location.

21
 Fig. 7 Julie Mehretu, Stadia II, 2007.

Though Mehretu literally traces map imagery from projected images onto her

painting surfaces, I have abandoned the need to make my work resemble a traditional

map in order to affect its function. The magnitude of Mehretu’s work reflects the

abundance and complexity of information we have access to today. My response to

information overload is to pare down components in my work and create small intervals

to direct attention to an intimate and, arguably, fundamental level of understanding.

Contemporary artist Marco Maggi uses common materials and approaches to

mine, such as printer paper, plastic slide mounts, aluminum foil, and marking mirrors. He

intends to make visual comments on the disappointment our society is causing. He uses

meticulously precise methods of drawing and cutting to make work that seems to present

“the infinitesimal and the undecipherable.”27 In his piece Blind Slides, (Fig. 8) Maggi

has inserted tiny Braille drawings on aluminum foil into white plastic slide mounts as a

22
visual punch line about the miscommunication of art: “while the information is physically

incised into the surface, the opacity of the material prevents us from illuminating the slide

and therefore, the image. They are Braille for those who can see, which in turn, makes

them blind.”28 He is ultimately preoccupied with “the fact that we live in a world in

which we are overloaded with information. The result is ironic: the more we know the

less we know.” Maggi states, “Understanding less is my profession. It requires rigorous

training. When we don’t understand, we doubt, and reduce the speed of our decision-

making...”29 Our work is strikingly similar. Though Maggi may present his work as

“undecipherable” or “meaningless,” I see his commitment to it as meaningful. I do not

enter my studio with an intention to make “undecipherable” or “meaningless” work – I

am committed to my process and work as it makes sense to me, and that commitment is

what is ultimately being presented.

Fig. 8 Marco Maggi, 2010, Vertical Carousel, detail, drypoint on aluminum in 80 slide

mounts, 8.5 inch diameter.

23
 Throughout my graduate coursework, my artwork has resided in a realm of

subtlety, quietude, reduction, fragility and obsession. Though I experimented with more

physically assertive collaged paintings, I found this work to be unsuccessful because I

found myself making small repetitious mark-making and assembling small scraps onto a

surface too dense and large to support the intimate scale of my activity. I am attracted to

work that is subtle and quiet. A particular exhibition, “Apparently Invisible,” at the

Drawing Center in New York, helped me accept the restrained work I make and that it

can function in a world seemingly driven by the dramatic. The introduction to the

catalogue of this exhibition describes the expectations of viewing work in a gallery:

... you can be sure that the artwork will announce itself clearly, so you can begin to

decipher what is and what is not the art. So prepared, you come upon something that does

not quite register. Paradoxically, almost because you are having trouble seeing, you

cannot stop looking. The work is a source of uncertainty rather than enhanced

knowledge, at least at this stage. And you wonder if anything productive could come

from this uncertainty...30

The nine artists in this exhibition presented artwork evocative of this subtle and uncertain

perception. Artist Janine Magelssen installs plaster, putty, and wood forms directly to the

gallery walls and floors, allowing these relief forms to “relate to one another, yet question

their own legibility.”31 (Fig. 9) The exhibition’s focus was to present work that was

visually difficult to perceive, such as Marietta Hoferer’s Agnes Martin-like bands of

pencil and transparent and white tape on white paper or the overwrought graphite lines

that appear as shiny blobs in Anne Lindberg’s drawings. (Fig. 10) The array of quiet,

24
subtle, yet meticulous work in this exhibition has helped me from contextualizing my

work in a contemporary setting to informing my choices for the presentation of my work.

Fig. 9 Detail of Janine Magelssen’s installation at The Drawing Center, New York, 2009.

Fig. 10 Anne Lindberg, motion drawing 05, 2009, graphite on cotton board,

28 x 34 inches.
25
 The restraint displayed in my drawings, from the use of humble materials to the

use of basic drawing methods to the concept of mapping and grids, demonstrates my need

to control decisions and determine what information I want to process and how distilled it

can it become yet still hold meaning. By following my own logic with rigor I give

meaning to my actions. As this level of self-reflexive understanding, I strive to create a

feeling of my need to understand, approached through the rawness of a laboring hand

inspired by Agnes Martin and the intense obsessive studies of objectivist scientists and

their atlases. Ultimately my efforts to process information reveal answers about myself.

26
 PLATES

Plate I. Delineation, 2011. Graphite and cut lines on paper and vellum, dimensions variable.

27
Plate II. Delineation (detail 1), 2011.

Plate III. Delineation (detail 2), 2011.

28
Plate IV. Installation shot of Sorted components, in the Schmidt Center Gallery,

Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, 2011.

29
Plate V. Sorted components 1, 2011. Cut paper and aluminum foil on graph paper,

18 x 24 inches.

30
Plate VI. Sorted components 2, 2011. Graphite, acrylic, cut paper, colored pencil and

graph paper, 24 x 36 inches.

Plate VII. Sorted componensts 2 (detail), 2011.

31
Plate VIII. Sorted components 3 (detail), 2011. Cut paper and graphite on graph paper,

24 x 18 inches.

32
Plate IX. Sorted components 4, 2011. Graphite, colored pencil, cut paper and graph

paper, 24 x 36 inches.

Plate X. Sorted components 4 (detail), 2011.

33
Plate XI. Sorted components 5, 2011. Graphite, cut paper, tape, and graph paper, 36 x 46 inches.

34
Plate XII. Sorted components 5 (detail 1), 2011.

35
Plate XIII. Sorted components 5 (detail 2), 2011.

36
 NOTES

1
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Brooklyn, New York: Zone Books,

2007), 240.
2
Ibid., 159.
3
Charles Darwent, “Slight of Hand: Agnes Martin’s hermetic paintings,” Modern

Painters (Date): 92.

4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.
6
Brendan Prendeville, “The Meanings of Acts: Agnes Martin and the Making of

Americans,” Oxford Art Journal 31.1): 64.

7
Richard Tuttle, “What Does One Look at in an Agnes Martin Painting? On the Occasion

of Her Ninetieth Birthday,” American Art 16, no. 3 (Autumn, 2002): 92.
8
Darwent, “Slight of Hand,” 93.
9
Ibid.
10
Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher, eds., Women Artists at the Millenium.

(Cambridge, Massachusetts: October Books, MIT Press, 2006), 176.

11
Ibid., 177.
12
Armstrong, Women Artists, 182.

37
13
Rosalind E. Krauss, Bachelors (Cambridge, Massachusetts: October books, MIT Press,

1999), 78.
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid., 79.
17
Ibid.
18
Ibid.
19
Katharine Harmon, ed. You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the

Imagination (New York, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), 16.
20
Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York, New York: The Guilford Press, 1992), 1.
21
Harmon, You Are Here, 17.
22
Daston, Objectivity, 241.
23
Ibid.
24
Art21, PBS. “Systems & Contemporary Art: Julie Mehretu.”

http://pbs.org/art21/series/seasonfive/systems.php (accessed February 7, 2010).

25
Ibid.
26
Ibid.
27
Josée Bienvenu Gallery, Marco Maggi: by disappointment only, November 9, 2007 to

January 5, 2008, exhibition press release.

http://www.joseebienvenugallery.com/pdf/MM_by%20disappointment%20only_2008.pdf

38
28
Alex Glauber, “Visual Yogiisms in Marco Maggi’s Parking Any Time at Josée

Bienvenu,” The Drawing Center Blog, entry posted November 1, 2010,

http://www.joseebienvenugallery.com/pdf/2010-

Drawing_Center_Blog_Marco_Maggi(Parking_Any_Time).pdf
29
Josée Bienvenu Gallery, Marco Maggi: by disappointment only, November 9, 2007 to

January 5, 2008, exhibition press release.

30
The Drawing Center. Selections Spring 2009 Apparently Invisible, curated by Nina

Katchadourian, Joanna Kleinberg, Rachel Liebowitz (catalog published on the

occasion of the exhibition Apparently Invisible, February 20 – March 28, 2009).

Drawing Papers 84. The Drawing Center, New York, New York: 2009, 6.
31
Ibid., 7.

39
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Armstrong, Carol and Catherine de Zegher, eds. Women Artists at the Millenium.

Cambridge, Massachusetts: October Books, MIT Press, 2006.

Art21, PBS. “Systems & Contemporary Art: Julie Mehretu.”

http://pbs.org/art21/series/seasonfive/systems.php (accessed February 7, 2010).

Darwent, Charles. “Slight of Hand: Agnes Martin’s hermetic paintings,” Modern

Painters, July/August, 2005.

Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison, ed. Objectivity. Zone Books, Brooklyn, New York:

2007.

Drawing Center, The. Selections Spring 2009 Apparently Invisible, curated by Nina

Katchadourian, Joanna Kleinberg, Rachel Liebowitz (catalog published on the

occasion of the exhibition Apparently Invisible, February 20 – March 28, 2009).

Drawing Papers 84. The Drawing Center, New York: 2009.

Drawing Center Blog, The. “Visual Yogiisms in Marco Maggi’s PARKING ANY TIME

at Josée Bienvenu Gallery” by Alex Glauber, posted, November 1, 2010,

http://drawingcenter.org/index.php/topics/drawing-center-on-everything/page/5/

(accessed March 8, 2011).

Harmon, Katharine, ed. You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the

Imagination. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.

Krauss, Rosalind E. Bachelors. Cambridge: October books, MIT Press, 1999.

40
Press release of Marco Maggi exhibition, “by disappointment only, November 9, 2007 to

January 5, 2008,” Josée Bienvenu Gallery,

http://www.joseebienvenugallery.com/pdf/MM_by%20disappointment%20only_2008.pdf

Prendeville, Brendan. “The Meanings of Acts: Agnes Martin and the Making of

Americans.” Oxford Art Journal 31, issue 1 (2007): 53-73.

Tuttle, Richard. “What Does One Look at in an Agnes Martin Painting? On the Occasion

of Her Ninetieth Birthday,” American Art 16, no. 3 (Autumn, 2002).

Wood, Denis. The Power of Maps. New York: The Guilford Press, 1992.

41
 FURTHER READINGS

Begley, Sharon. “I Can’t Think!” Newsweek Magazine, March 7, 2011.

Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. London;

New York: Verso, 2002.

Cassiman, Bart, ed. The Sublime Void. Nevada: Ludion Editions, 1995.

Craig Owens. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power and Culture. Berkeley and

Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1992.

Daston, Lorraine, ed. Things That Talk. Brooklyn, New York: Zone Books, 2008.

Dexter, Emma. Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing. New York:

Phaidon Press Limited, 2005.

Garner, Steve, ed. Writing on Drawing: Essays on Drawing Practice and Research.

Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Richards, Malcom K. Derrida Reframed. New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2008.

42