Drawing in Motion
The Drawing Center, New York
2011
This review of Drawings in Motion organized curated by Rachel Liebowitz and Joanna Kleinberg at The Drawing Center in New York was initially published in the Huffington Post 05/25/2011
Walking by 200 Lafayette Street (between Broome and Kenmare) in Soho, you come across a beautiful though partly hidden by a scaffolding projection of videos in the window of an abandoned store, a nice surprise of a different kind of street art in a neighborhood where art used to be so prominent.
The five handmade drawings in motion presented here are moving in the largest sense possible.
Brent Green's take on Santa Claus is quite humorous, personal and darkly poetic. You do not see often a Santa in despair putting together an awkward bunch of presents, among them a dead crow. Equally poignant is Tala Madani's solo dancer who silently progresses in a changing dark background before disappearing. Susi Jirkuff's Travel Stained,brings to life a musician coming back home while his soul continues to wander in the tour he just ended.
The mundane is also depicted and elevated in Kakyoung Lee's drypoint Animation Walk2009 where a naked walker becomes a backpacker walking on an ocean of bushes that becomes stairs and then a single tree.
These poetic and existential works undoubtedly reveal and challenge questions such as culture, identity and how we relate (or not) to our surroundings.
The opening night, a woman was shocked that Raymond Pettibon's powerful video showed a needle going into a man's arm. I was not. It felt just right and like each of the scenes and stories depicted in these five animations, it felt subtly connected to (street) life and its protagonists.We hope the show's curators, Rachel Liebowitz and Joanna Kleinberg, both from the Drawing Center, as well as the notforprofit SmartSpaces will bring us more of these animated graffitis in the windows of the vacant spaces of New York City and elsewhere.
Anne Couillaud