March 12 – April 16, 2000
Composed of work by artists who have taught at Parsons in the MFA Painting and Sculpture programs in the past five years, the exhibition operates on the conviction that drawing is an indispensable process or component of art. While no overriding aesthetic unifies the work here, let alone any consensus on how drawing functions within studio practice (a trait that adds to the ongoing fluidity of definition), the exhibition nonetheless reveals as many intersections and connections as divergences and contrasts. Both Roger Shepherd and George Negroponte, the co-curators of the project, have interestingly drawn on a mix of works, some of which might be deemed by many curators as too fragmentary or incomplete for exhibition (refinement being the priority of display). What they have assembled here is a glimpse into the least considered aspect of artistic production—the torn or partial sketches that might never leave the studio, the notebook with its dissolved imagery and writing, the disregarded study, or the drawing with its erasures and elisions that like many of these seeming throw-aways form part of an interconnected tissue that cannot be diminished by technical virtuosity and formal prowess.
