Ethan Gould
Ethan Gould
The Judgement of Porous
Drawings and Objects
May 18- July 6, 2013
Opening Party:
May 18th
8:00pm- 11:00pm
FREE
Wine, Booze, Food, Music
“Paul Klee said drawing is “taking a line out for a walk.” This implies that it’s on a leash, which evokes a whole set of questions about drawers’ relationships to their lines. Is the line well-behaved? Is it scratching at the exit to get let out, or is it being reluctantly dragged outside like a french bulldog? Why has the line been indoors? What delineates in and out for a line? Has it been convalescing? Is this like some kind of kinky line party? Should I have worn more black?
This is a show of several years of sketches in pen and ink, composed on paper and on printed digital images. They were borne out of a period of intense chronic pain, now over, and so share some similarities with obsessive artwork: a horror vacui, a need to delineate time as a coping mechanism; stark linear contrast, control and restraint as a visual theme, and repetition of form. I didn’t reflect on that at the outset. In thinking of these drawings as sketches for some unknown future project, I stumbled upon a working method without erasers, which I have hated since childhood. In that way, they are also a dark and hilarious attempt at perfectionism, a holdover from childhood that assumed retreading a mark is somehow a ‘mistake’, that a one-shot method shows more mastery than reworking. Hoo boy.
It’s only partially sturm-un-drang. It’s also created from a love of anatomical illustrations, cartoon inkwork, scientific depictions of the growth patterns of organisms, visionary drawings, medieval margin illuminations, subculture rags, and the objects arranged in this room. Black ink has a clever way of finding their similarities. Above all they are a mash note to maximalism: I consider them a thought process on the fantasy of containing/controlling totality. It is a fantasy omnipresent in our habitus of constant visual gobsmackery: the arrangements of objects or images or ideas that evoke a sense All Of The Things, the anatomical diagram of the entire world. ”
-EG
Ethan Gould is a visual artist whose work has appeared onstage, in the gallery and in print. He studied pre-renaissance art in Florence, Italy, visual science and literature at the University of Rochester, and developed events at the American Folk Art Museum. He has co-curated events, lectures and shows about the intersection of science, taxonomy and visual culture. He lives in Brooklyn.