Unfixed, February 3 – May 7, 2023
Opening Reception, February 3, 5–8 PM
Caves in the Pyrenees bear the marks of the first human artists 40,000 years ago–surprisingly accurate renderings of cave bears and saber-tooth tigers executed from flame-cooked wood. Charcoal for all its powdery looseness is surprisingly durable in the face of oxygen and sun. Even as William Turner’s carmine sunsets have gone pale, the blackness of the carbon in his work endures. Scorched bone, waxy graphite ore, baked sticks, and soot, for all the chromatic innovation civilization has mustered in the industrial age, kicks time’s ass like nothing else. And still a vine charcoal drawing can be erased in a moment with a forearm like chalk on a teacher’s chalkboard.
This amazing combo of permanence and workability helped create a tradition around carbon-based rendering that has typecast it in a role that has persisted in studios for centuries. Nothing is better for sketching the ephemeral pose of a live figure. Nothing is so indelible, abundant, and portable for the sketchbook, or appropriate for the preliminary drawing for an oil painting. But its success has tended to diminish its favorability in addressing the subjects and forms in an expanded art-world. The artists in Unfixed look to traditional carbon-based drawing media to generate alternative possibilities of that ancient element through material exploration, conceptual reordering, and upended approaches to rendering.
