DRAWING THE CITY: DAY ONE, DAY TWO

2004

Ephemeral public project: canvas, stones, tree trunks, umbrellas, pigment, graphite, charcoal, sound, performance, with participation of pedestrians

ARTIST STATEMENT

Drawing the City is a multi-media performance and outdoor installation inviting pedestrians to participate in the act of drawing to explore ideas of landscape, body, surface, and metaphors of fluidity. In Drawing the City I continue to draw around my body crawling on a large-scale canvas covering the pavement of the Grand Street, in front of Hudson Valley MOCA, while the pedestrians join me at any point in the process. A video camera suspended from the rooftop becomes a source of images screened inside the museum, presenting the drawing action from an aerial view. For Drawing the City I combined sounds recorded during my several visits in town, with underwater sounds recorded during an immersion in a sculpted vessel in my studio, sounds of children playing outdoors and excepts from vocal music by medieval composer Hildegard von Bingen.

EXHIBITIONS

Peekskill Project, curated by Koan Jeff Baysa, Hudson Valley MOCA (formerly Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art (HVCCA), Peekskill, New York, 2004

Monika Weiss: Intervals and Carolee Schneemann: Infitinity Kisses, Remy Toledo Gallery, New York in collaboration with Samuel Lallouz Gallery, Montreal, 2004

ESSAY

The linking of drawing with the editing of video is another particular characteristic of Monika Weiss’s work. Both have a very personal touch, and, in both, the result is to create not so much a depiction as a presence. The video image is not ‘of’’ her, but seems to arise from her own offering of herself, the result of some alchemy between the unmanned camera’s “surveying, cold, motionless eye” and the emotion brought to the editing process. The birds-eye view serves to create a site, a space, separated from the rest of the environment, a graphic world. On the horizontal plane the body’s movement itself takes on a graphic quality: “Outside the world and inside the drawing”. In Drawing the City, 2004, which took place on sheets of paper spread on the pavement across from the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, NY, with traffic only a few feet away but invisible, local children join the artist lying down and draw around their bodies. They enter and leave the arena as they wish, little bundles of energy which, thanks to the telescoping of time by the editing process, and the use of dissolve, can simply materialise in the scene, or fade away. They can appear ephemeral against the materiality of the drawing. Drawing is the connecting thread between the technological and the corporeal aspects of her work, the theatrical and the plastic, the communal and the intensely solitary. (Guy Brett, Time Being, 2005)

To read full essay click here.