Tenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

Drawing is an emancipatory practice in which one is set free from legal, social or political restrictions. It is an immersive act, to which I refer as a sentient-based labor. Operating beyond the two-dimensional plane, and sourcing derelict materials as medium, the consequent body of work yields a set of drawing assemblies with the relative capacity to unite or react or interact with the latent dimensions of our collective inherited landscape. Utilizing a range of domains as a means of exploring not only the tangible but the intangible nature of such material cultivations, the work is based on a series of modulated experimental actions (material modalities). Each work is driven by the nascent possibility of a persistent desire to intercourse with existing material surrounds pursuant a philosophical position that leverages perceptual notions of chiaroscuro - the disposition of light and dark. By extension, the conscious and unconscious, the seen and the unseen, focus and open awareness, and the made un-made as factors in the realm of understanding and producing space. It is a full-scale, three-dimensional methodology conducted parallel to meditative and photographic documentation as a means to explore its affects (immaterial harmonics). The drawing project, as a perceptual practice, facilitates this philosophical operation through a creative sequence that seeks to both reveal and erase. Sheen: atmospheric cartographies employs extant debri harvested from various sites throughout the Midwest. As cartographic configurations, each drawing assembly defines a conflated staging of material cultivations associated with industrialization, consumer culture and the inherited landscape.