ASH DRAWINGS

ASH DRAWINGS,

Scribner’s, Hunter, NY, 2018

Still House, New York City, NY, 2018

For several winters, I have collected ashes from communal fires and made drawings with them on newly fallen snow, recording the process with video and photographs. This mark-making gesture simultaneously embraces the ephemerality of experience and exists in tension with the impulse and narrative imperative to record and replay the event. By juxtaposing the ancient and embodied act of drawing with the rational and mechanical act of taking a picture, I investigate how we might keep the mental structures we create loose and light enough to allow us to remain present and fully participate in life as it unfolds.

In this first of a two-part exhibition, photographs are presented as fragments where the depicted gestural ash marks are deconstructed but still discernible, and accompanying drawings in ash on canvas further illuminate what we imagine in the negative space.

In this second of a two-part exhibit, sequential video stills offer a glimpse at the multiplicity of moments between the photographs on display, while alternating positives and negatives explore the representational potential of an exposed piece of film — what is most often unseen