Exhibition

The Line Between: Drawings, Notebooks, Material Research

29 Nov 2016 – 6 Jan 2017

Event times

Please see Chelsea College website for opening hours: http://www.arts.ac.uk

Cost of entry

The exhibition is open to UAL staff and students, alumni and SCONUL members during library opening hours. External visitors by appointment only.

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Chelsea College of Arts Library

London
England, United Kingdom

Event map

About

This exhibition, spread throughout six display cases in Chelsea College of Arts Library, focuses upon recent drawings by Sohrab Crews. The eight drawings on show have been selected from a still-ongoing series of works begun in 2001 and which currently amount to around 170 pieces. They are presented here with examples of several types of preparatory and supporting materials. 

Each work in the series measures 40 x 40cm and is in ink on paper. Partly planned in advance and partly improvised, most of these drawings include words which have been selectively sourced from advertisements and other consumer literature. Crews has, to a considerable degree, employed as the drawings' content the mystificatory, absurd language of advertising. Within them the words simultaneously function both as legible lists of found expressions and as compositional or formal structures. The drawings thus act both as archival networks of contemporary linguistic 'idiocies' and highly structured visual compositions readable as drawings in the usual sense of that term. A playful, exploratory approach to the making of these works stands in marked contrast to the narrow-minded commercialism of many of the texts employed. 

In order to produce these productively 'cryptic' pictures Crews has developed a rigorous working method involving the sourcing, sifting and ordering of the chosen phrases. On display alongside the drawings themselves are a number of Crews' sketchbooks, a list of 'Scrabble words', some four-letter word 'poems', charts of visual stylistic devices the artist has developed for later use, and examples of sequences of 'free-floating' terms utilised in composing the drawings. 

The show also includes a small amount of material relating to the walking stick imagery Crews has used in his work for the last twelve years, as well as one example from his parallel practice as a sculptor. As with the drawings this figure, notwithstanding its deceptively polished surface, has been assembled from the absurdly excessive detritus consumer society indifferently produces, acquires and brazenly parades. 

CuratorsToggle

Peter Suchin

Exhibiting artistsToggle

Sohrab Crews

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