The Drawing Collective / FENESTRATION Opening night, 6 – 8 pm Thursday 26 June Open until 5 pm Sunday 13 June Co-curated by Munira Naqui and Lisa Pang
A Composition of Windows1 Essay by Lisa Pang
Fenestration, an architectural term for the design and placement of multiple windows or other openings in a façade, is at once the title and curatorial construct for this group exhibition. Throughout the history of non-objective art and of abstraction, the visualised idea of framed and ordered pictorial space has continued to engage artists, with endless permutations of line, form, colour, material and media possible. The device of an aperture for looking - a fenestra2 - between interior and exterior provides site, border, and potent metaphor for abstract drawings by The Drawing Collective, a global cohort of artist-drawers. While each drawing was made in isolation to fit a uniform (window-like) format, as a collection of individual units on the gallery walls, they translate into a singular schematic drawing. Through this fiction of windows, one and many, 37 drawings become sites of camaraderie, complexity, and contemporary contradiction. Each artist has a unique window (100 x 20 cm) a space for drawing, and for looking through / at. Objectively stated, windows are known physical facts in the world, openings for light and air in a building. Located on an oft-drawn plan line between inside and outside and as an array of elements in a façade, fenestration is architectural composition. At its most sublime this might be a single oculus, a pendentive circling of arched windows, stained glass splintering coloured light into a dark interior. At its crudest, it might be an opening in a hut. Not so objectively stated, windows offer poetic (as well as conceptual) apertures. Eyes are said to be the windows to the soul. A window is often a metaphor; in art history, the rectilinear picture frame is often cast as a window into another reality, whether idealised representation or a mode that breaks with the past. Marcel Duchamp installed a window into a gallery as a fresh widow, wearing black leather for panes.3 Unlike the opening allowed by a door, a bodily scaled portal, windows are scaled more directly to the gaze. Fenestration in this context is really a way of guiding the act of looking through / at things – here, a collection of abstract drawings. As contemporary artists, we who do look out on our times and events, a window, or a series of windows, is also a good place for making other, non-visual observations.