But no matter how great the thematic differences between the winners of the Great Rivers Biennial 2008, Corey Escoto, Michelle Oosterbaan and Juan William Chávez share one thing in common: Each is profoundly rooted in drawing.

“Their practices are so varied. They’re each interested in very different issues and their relationship to drawing is very different as well,” says Laura Fried, the new assistant curator at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. “But all three are serious draftsmen. Hopefully visitors will draw their own connections.”

Jointly sponsored by the Contemporary and the Gateway Foundation, the Great Rivers Biennial was formed in 2004 with the hope of exposing promising local artists to the broader art world, and, by the same token, exposing the broader art world to the promising artists of St. Louis. Now in its third exhibition, the biennial — this year judged by Cheryl Brutvan (curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston), Lilian Tone (an assistant curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York) and Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson (director and chief curator of the Aspen Art Museum) — has quickly become the region’s most important juried exhibition. With increased importance has come deeper pockets: This year’s winners will receive $20,000 apiece, up from $15,000 in 2006.

“The best thing a contemporary art museum can do for its local artists is to show them and give them money,” says Paul Ha, the Contemporary’s director. “Our goal is to get [the prize money] to where an artist can actually leave their job for a year.”

In years past the biennial has featured everything from a speaker-studded Chevy Blazer to oil paintings to installations, and while this year’s artists all call upon their shared foundation of drawing, they’ve each placed draftsmanship in the service of another medium.

Michelle Oosterbaan

Originally working as an installation artist whose works — colorful, geometric, inspired by modernist architecture — created the impression of distinct spaces within spaces, Michelle Oosterbaan made the jump to figurative drawing three years back.

“I wanted to slow down,” says Oosterbaan, a visiting assistant professor at Wash. U.’s School of Art. “I enjoyed the fact that I could transform places quickly, but in the end I wanted to make a more beautiful surface. I wanted to spend more time developing something with more of a sensitive touch.”

The result is a series of drawings that takes personal memory — its conflicting distortions, obsessions and vagaries — and seeks to reproduce it on the page. By turns highly detailed and merely gestural, outsize in scale or minute, rendered in bold strokes or the faintest shadow, Oosterbaan’s richly layered drawings seek to mimic the nonlinear and evolving nature of memory: Depending on where you stand, past events will either loom large or retreat into darkness.

“A lot of these drawings are about place or memories of places and creating a sense of myth or story based on memory and little moments in time,” Oosterbaan says. “I’m trying to catch all of them — the big picture, the macro idea — and then the smaller bits inside of that. I’m fascinated by how big events are made out of really small things.”

Many of her drawings, punctuated by large “breathing” spaces of pure, unvarnished paper, feature expertly rendered animals — bears, large cats, dogs — that inhabit metamorphic spaces leading to a hint of water, fences, flowers or layers of earth.

Oosterbaan now works in figurative drawing, but her show also includes installed elements: a stenciled chalk-dust carpet Oosterbaan has created on-site and an “environment” she constructed in the Contemporary’s windows of overlapping colored wax paper that, she says, is an “attempt to really surround the viewer and have them inhabit a place.”

Her past as an installation artist is everywhere on display here, even in her choice of large sheets of paper. Though painterly in size, they’re then populated with intricately rendered and often minute subjects.

“I have to think: What’s worth drawing? Every day we’re bombarded with images, and I need to sit down and think: How does it fit into the ecology of the drawing?” says Oosterbaan. “By pulling the spectator closer, that gets them to participate in the story. These drawings have very particular associations for me, and I don’t anticipate that people will come away with the same story that I’m presenting. It’s more interesting to me to keep it open-ended.”

My recent drawings have evolved out of the process of working on temporary installations.  These site-responsive projects enveloped the viewer within rectilinear fields of color, sharp edges of taped lines, and references to the history of architecture.  Each project created elastic environments that integrated the viewer’s shifting perspective. These analytic and intuitive installations proposed a coincidence between the physical facts of the site and the viewer’s interaction with them.

My new drawings continue to explore this intuitive superimposition of spaces retuned by the possibilities of the page and the hand.  Instead of guiding the viewer around a given room with trajectories of colored planes, these works on paper employ a mixture of abstract patterns and deliberate imagery to suggest, as well as chart, multiple paths across the page.  Rendered with colored pencil, they compass a range of pictorial and graphic languages that flirt with a kind of over-telling.

Cutout (Detail) |  2006 | Colored pencil, graphite, and gouache on paper | 78.5 x 51 inches

The scale of the largest drawings suggests that of walls: their accumulations of colored line and passages of wash-like tints mesh in and out of focus.  This allows them to be read atmospherically from a distance.  At close range, the layered hand-drawn imagery comes into view at different speeds.  Drawn softly at first, the details of these discrete vignettes build from pieces of my everyday life to achieve a precision and abundance that resembles a form of truth.

The act of drawing guides my search towards a new narrative. Since these detailed depictions require time to absorb, they also slow down the process of looking.  With its apparent lack of hierarchy, multiple perspectives, and shifts in scale, each drawing becomes a theater of space mirroring the distracted state of memory and daydreams.  They navigate an escape to a place where the mundane journey merges with the mythic narrative.

I draw to document important moments in my life.  I map cause and effect relationships that capture and combine elements of fantasy and reality, of wonder and practicality.  With handmade images, graphic patterns, and veils of space, I define and locate myself in time and place.

First, I make a “punch” to elicit a visual and visceral response from the spectator.  Then, I work on the relationships of scale and intensity of the details, which pull viewers in and surround them.  Finally, I chart space and time with images and graphic symbols that are handmade and varied in touch.  As if keeping a diary, I list and follow events in my everyday life.  I draw, erase, redraw, erase, and then keep drawing from the ghost image erasure until I see a connection between mark and meaning.  For reflection, I leave the paper up for as long as it takes to complete the drawing.

As viewers engage with the work, they can combine the images and graphic elements in any way, in order that makes sense to them.  Because the drawings are basically stream-of-consciousness narration, I expect the viewer to combine the images and marks in a unique way, in his or her own fashion.

To propose that drawing redraw the borders separating past, present and future reconciles certain assumptions about the process that are sometimes held in opposition, especially when appreciating the differences between the original moment of a drawing’s emergence and its subsequent viewing. Jacques Derrida, noting that artists usually turn away from the subjects they are depicting in order to observe their drafting tools make contact with the page, has suggested that drawing is always done from memory.3 On the other hand, Norman Bryson, writing about the usually irretractable character of the raw mark on paper—especially in relation to the re-workable, layered density of applied paint—asserts that “The drawn line always exists in the present tense, in the time of its unfolding, the ongoing time of a present that constantly presses forward.”4

When representational drawings are not describing physical subjects before the eye of the artist they can become a means of retrieving visions harbored in the mind as well as a mode of speculation. Following the logic offered by Derrida, if the subjects being depicted exist as interior, mental scenes or emerge unpremeditated on the page in the manner of sentences, there is no need for artists to turn away from them as they draw. We could say that such images are projected directly onto the paper from the mind and then traced without hesitation. The act of rendering becomes akin to that of contour drawing, although instead of imagining the pen or pencil touching the edges of the external subject, the artist follows the path of his or her thinking as if it were a fusion of image and language.

Perhaps the most literal expression of drawing as drawnwork is manifest in the projects of Marie Sivak.  Tapping her own automatic, graphic responses, some of her works on paper are generated by scattering the letters of a short text or creating an abstract, linear pattern on the page to register the impact of witnessing a trauma (as in her Glasgow Series) and or experiencing pain (as in the Odussomai Series). Many of her drawings are populated by female figures that appear both comprised of and suspended by unfurling ribbons of language. Held aloft by these bandage-like supports, the figures demonstrate the weightlessness of specters. Writing about some of the drawings in the exhibition, she has stated that she thinks of line as “a piece of string which, through knots, twists, and tangles accumulates to supplant the experience of text with the experience of image.”5

The works of Michelle Oosterbaan, likewise, are generated by the collision of linear abstraction and detailed description. Each of her drawings confronts us with a map-like array of layered incidents that plot actual views and events in her life. Shaped by recollection and the slow deliberation of her labor, each of these visions occupies its own timeframe on the page and becomes legible at a pace determined both by the artist and the viewer. We read Oosterbaan’s abstract passages quickly while her realistic rendering insists on absorption. Together, these two modes reflect what she calls the “distracted state of memory” that navigates “an escape to a place where the mundane journey merges with the mythic narrative.”6 Staring into some of these cloudlike palimpsests, there is a sense that no amount of looking will reveal the sum of figures and forms embedded there. In the process of discovering and deciphering Oosterbaan’s images, they become our own.

The recent drawings of Hiro Sakaguchi explore the distinctions between personal and cultural memory. Employing the differences between East and West as a point of departure, his floating islands, mountaintops (Matterhorn and Fuji), and other aerial views give his drawings the semblance of daydreams that we imagine Sakaguchi might experience on plane rides between Philadelphia and his native Tokyo. In another body of work, miniaturized scenes from both locations become analogs for digital photographs on the tiny screens of handcrafted mobile phones carved from wood. These souvenirs can be read as physical manifestations of memories extracted from the mind and made portable. As such, Sakaguchi’s mementos recreate the manner in which memory serves the process of assimilation while at the same time demonstrating the limits of representation itself.

Perhaps the farthest from pure drawing, Sherif Habashi’s egg tempera works on paper propose a material and conceptual amalgam of drafting, painting, and printing that is emblematic for this exhibition. Seen from a distance, these labor-intensive works possess the detachment and mannered vocabulary of antique wallpaper. Upon closer inspection however, his tigers and hikers become allegories of personal experience camouflaged as generic imagery. The flatness Habashi obtains by leaving large portions of the colored paper he uses untouched provides a pictorial freedom that allows each figure to establish its own pocket of space and time. Scanned by the viewer, these isolated vignettes coalesce to create a panoramic narrative in the manner of Renaissance masters. The implied but never capitulated repetition of images, like all of those in the exhibition, disrupts our routine perceptions of the flow of time as well as the standard distinctions between the coded nature of private memories and those that are visually and emotionally available to others. While their meanings and associations may differ, it is the actuality of these images, as thoughtfully rendered by these four artists, that offers them the chance to become our own memories as well.

Notes
1. Marie Sivak, exhibition proposal, 2007.
2. Ibid.
3. Jacques Derrida, “Memoirs of the Blind: The Self Portrait and Other Ruins,” (catalog essay for exhibition at the Louvre, Paris, 1990).
4. Norman Bryson, “A Walk for a Walk’s Sake,” (catalog essay for “The Stage of Drawing: Gesture and Act,” The Drawing Center, New York, 2003).
5. Marie Sivak, artist statement, 2007.
6. Michelle Oosterbaan, artist statement (Drawing Papers 67, catalog for “Levity,” The Drawing Center, New York, 2007).

Richard Torchia is an artist and director of Arcadia University Art Gallery, Glenside, Pennsylvania.

Drawn with color pencil and painted with watered-down gouache, Oosterbaan’s layers of randomly occurring imagery pulls a viewer’s eye in and out, like a zoom lens.  The eight recent works in her first one-person show at Gallery Joe emphasize both the variety of her imagery and the contrast of its delicacy and evanescence against the powerful physicality of her sheets of paper.

To its credit, Arcadia University Art Gallery’s group exhibitions almost always project the finger-on-the-pulse, bigger-picture approach, and none more so than the gallery’s 24^th “Works on Paper” biennial.

In this case, the outsider was Cornelia Butler, chief curator of the department of drawings at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, who has selected 48 works by 40 artists from 883 entries.  With them, she has created an impressively succinct but also fluid view of the kind of art being made here that is both peculiar to this area and also relevant to the art world at large.

Rockpool (Detail of Skull) | 2005 | 7 drawings installed 12″ x 82″

She did not take the biennial’s title literally, either – only about half the works constitute drawings or prints in the traditional sense.  The paper in this gallery has been deployed for, among other things, James Johnson’s cardboard Dell computer box with an exquisite diorama of a country scene inside; Linda Yun’s two stacks of letter size paper; one with a blue stripe painted around it, another dusted pink with makeup; and John Schlesinger’s inkjet print of an overhead light fixture in a shaped bronze frame. (There’s a healthy dose of sculpture and photography in this show.)

There is also a staggering variety of actual drawing on paper, from Robert Chaney’s bleak little drawings of what appear to be cropped views from a window (of telephone poles, edges of buildings, tips of branches) to Michelle Oosterbaan’s phantasmagoric colored-pencils drawings of dream-like, floating images, to Randall Seller’s tiny renderings of a futuristic village.

For a show of this size – a mere 48 works – its turns out, really push the limits of this smallish exhibition space – the installation is crisp and coherent.  Works that are predominantly black-and-white with complex compositions are in close proximity, for instance, including Astrid Bowlby’s densely patterned drawings and Stuart Rome’s photograph of dense foliage.

Sculptural forms and two-dimensional ones are situated so as to suggest dialogues, such as the playful one between the webbed cardboard globe-shaped sculpture by Thomas Vance and Richard Ryan’s large inkjet print of what look like strips o f 35mm film tossed into the air, or the more unsettling conversation between Gabriel Marinenez’s pile of blackbird-shaped confetti and Judith Schaechter’s linocut of a girl with flowers streaming out of her mouth.

Finally, this is not a show about individual. Its’ an exhibition that stretches the eye and the mind and makes more of paper than you ever thought possible.

Oosterbaan’s now familiar wall drawings and site specific images and patterns make color palpable, and get us to use color to measure our experience of space. Her typical hues, in medium ranges of contrasting warm and cool colors, stay on the surface and a virtue of their flatness – or at least seem undisturbed by desires to approach or retreat.  Panels about an inch thick spread across the floor, allowing you to walk on them: lined up rectangles in two side-by-side touching rows here, and another two over there.  They empty the space more than they fill it, by separating your perceptions of it into measured areas.  The work invites you to notice how you interact the colors, following them across the floor and up the wall to the ceiling and repeating your observations four or five times as the colored rectangles cover different sections of the floor and the four walls.

It is comforting to me that whenever I feel like I don’t know what is going on in an Oosterbaan installation, I get the sense that its neither because I’m not applying enough thought to it, but rather because I’m not paying close enough attention – in particular to its environment.  Oosterbaan here, as in previous installations, always addresses you and the space equally in her panels or lines of color.  As each series of colors shift hues in measured steps, the carefully constructed parallels between the dimensions of colors and the dimensions of the room become clear, the width of the doorways referenced in the rows on the floor and the empty floor space between them reflecting the width of the wall.  The colored rectangles going up and across the wall sometimes echo measurements of the body, seeming at times to be about the length of an arm here, or a leg there, other times alluding to the shape of the windows or moldings.  If none of these become precise, it is because the scale of the body and the architectural scale are present at the same moment and place in the work.

Focused more on the present than on memory, Oosterbaan’s current installation lacks the playful, intelligent punning shapes of her previous work, where stripes extending from vents interacted with lines that became diagrams and addressed our remembrance of architecture as well as our mental images of it.  She has carefully delineated the terms of the problem that she has adhered to here: creating space by reinforcing our measured responses to color.