I'm curating a new punk drawing show at Noir Darkroom featuring Phil Edwards, Tammy Honey, John Power, Jessia Schwientek, Mad Pixie, and Shaun Wilson which looks at a new way of understanding Metamodernist drawing.
Drawing as a fine arts medium has, throughout the history of Western art, concerned itself with the execution of line, shape, tone, form, and light to manifest the image into the subject. Yet through a Metamodernist framework, that is to say, in a context after the demise of Postmodernism, drawing has revealed new considerations for the image by oscillating both the traditional principles of drawing, yielded through its timeless historicity, and the anti-drawing premise, often heralded as ‘the death of drawing’, to congeal into a new type of understanding and critical practice. As such, Metamodernist drawing is both dead and undead, political and apolitical, offensive and not offensive, and established and unestablished. While Modernism and Postmodernism harboured a singularity for drawing, Metamodernist drawing exists in duality while at the same communicating a separation and inclusion of intentional disruption.
This drawing show assembles a duality by conceptually challenging how we understand drawing and thus to derive back at a point of value to suggest that drawing is a vital and critical component of all sums of art. Some of the works in the exhibition are easily recognisable as ‘a drawing’ while other works challenge the medium as being ‘not drawing’ yet situate themselves within drawing as a means to assemble a non-drawing drawing context, or, in more prescriptive terms, to be ‘un-drawings’. When taking this into consideration, the critical outcomes of the exhibiting artists take a position of awareness of this oscillation - with pencil, charcoal, texta, human blood, collage, photographic images, and typography - to create a new premise for understanding drawing in ways that propel the medium into a twenty-first century system otherwise noted as a ‘meta war machine’.
NOIR Darkroom Gallery, Melbourne, Australia