Project Description

Sketches is a formal experiment investigating the materiality of the pencil. Initially six artworks were created. Each of these works attempt to render a 6 x 6 x 6 inch graphite cube using various media. However, the nature of the cube is such that the work is self-fulfilling. The cube performs reflexive, representational gestures innately and thus limits its own potential. Inspired by the practices of various Modernist, Conceptual, and Oulipian artists, I allow these ontological constraints to propagate work. Set free, the cube generates Sketches. From drawing to sculpture to photograph to print to projection to extrusion, the cube transforms into the pencil which initiated the sequence.

The piece begins with a pencil—the most basic of artist's tools—composed from a six-sided hexagonal graphite cube whose molecular structure is composed of similarly hexagonal carbon molecules. The six sketches trace a kind of mathematical alchemy by subliming graphite across media until it ultimately returns to its point of departure. The result of this pressure is not the transformation of carbon to diamond, but the formation of an endlessly replicating recursive loop.

This repeating series of six, sequential sketches puts pressure on techniques of mimetic representation and questions the ideological implications associated with indexical mark-making. By bringing together the language of conceptual art, digital poetry, and scientific discourse, these six mark-making exercises relocate the moment of invention from the artist's hand to the artist's tools by way of self-referential molecular structures and automated artificial intelligence.

By imaging Modernism, indexicality, and other pseudo-empirical art ontologies as inescapable Mobius handcuffs, a particular type of bound practice is rendered. What is left to draw upon when the auto-pencil sketches infinite self-portraits?

Project Pages

Exhibition Schedule

At the 100 Gallery (Exhibition)

in Gainesville, FL from September 29 to October 12, 2008

At the 100 Gallery (Aftermath)

in Gainesville, FL from September 29 to October 12, 2008