NEWPORT, R.I. – The work of nine artists who use drawing, photography and digital media to explore relationships with the physical environment will be on display when “locatingPLACE, 9 Propositions from the Boston Drawing Project” is featured at Dorrance Hamilton Gallery Nov. 8-Dec. 19.
The public is invited to join the artists for an opening reception on Thursday, Nov. 8 from 5 to 8 p.m. The gallery is located on the corner of Lawrence and Leroy avenues.
These works on paper use the tools of marking, recording, mapping and measuring to extend the visual language of landscape often within a conceptual framework. The works in locatingPLACE evidence each artist’s unique process and interaction with specific geographies that go beyond a scenic representation of nature.
In some cases, understanding location begins with observation, a path and a journey. Raphael Griswold’s drawings record travels around New England with a sketchpad and grab bag of art supplies, paying attention to the overlooked and unconsidered. His drawings, determined by the number of pages in the sketchbook and a one-hour time limit, accumulate like piles of leaves.
Andrea Sherrill Evans photographs her walks along the Appalachian Trail then translates her findings into delicate line drawings. By violating her own drawings with bursts of red paint, she draws attention to how we brutally mark our trails in the landscape in order to find our way.
Nancy Murphy Spicer uses her bike rides around Berlin to understand the geography of a new city; the shape of her route on the pages of her guidebook become the basis for exploring color, shape and collage.
Robin Mandel spins his camera to transform the shimmering nightscape into an abstracted oculus of concentric patterns.
Technology enters the conversation with Carly Glovinsky’s drawings of the endpages of the onetime ubiquitous phonebook. Her pencil drawings make geologic strata and landscape forms out of an informational tool for place finding. Julia Featheringill uses Mapquest to find the travel route between towns with place names referencing geometry, creating an elegantly minimal line drawing Between Two Points.
Lina Maria Giraldo allows geographical data to grow like crystals defined by national borders in her computer generated digital prints.
Ali Osborn and Rosa McElheny use the Internet for source material. Finding images from aerial views on Google, Ali Osborn carefully draws Minnesota’s Mall of America from overhead. The rooftops of the sprawling megastructure are at once a symbol of American bounty and crass commercialism. The Internet is a research tool for personal memory in Rosa McElheny’s drawings. McEleheny hunts down images of places with personal significance and translates her findings into soft-focus graphite drawings on French-folded books. Combining images and text, McElheny addresses memory, longing and our often transitory relationship to place.
locatingPLACE has been organized by Joseph Carroll, director of Carroll and Sons, Boston. Founded in 1999 and housed at Carroll and Sons, The Boston Drawing Project is a curated collection of works on paper with, at present, over 100 artists currently represented in the Project. Portfolios of their work are kept in publicly accessible flat files. A selection of work by each participating artist is available online at Carrollandsons.net.
The Dorrance H. Hamilton Gallery is handicap accessible with parking along Lawrence and Leroy Avenues. Its exhibits are open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Wednesdays and Fridays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturdays and Sundays noon to 4 p.m. The gallery is closed on Mondays.