The Drawing Center NYC, Selections 2007: Levity, Installation by Lisa Perez, titled: How Strange It Is To Be Anything, (February-March 2007)
Artist statement for How Strange It Is To Be Anything, 2007:
My work evolves from questions that arise in a culture of speed, surface, and endless distractions—a culture that does not easily embrace ambiguity. What do we value and what warrants our attention? What happens when the ubiquitous stuff around us is subtly shifted, or even merely pointed out? An accelerated rate of technological invention and globalization on so many different levels changes our world each and every second. The precise ways in which this affects our ways of seeing and thinking also changes at an exponential rate. Decades ago, Buckminster Fuller aptly described this phenomena as “accelerating acceleration,” a term that has only become all the more relevant.
The sense of wonder I experience at the awkwardness of everything being mixed up with everything—the saturation of visual stimuli—prompts me to highlight the micro moments of things that go unseen. A culture of velocity is a tough place in which to create awareness and focused attention on the little things that compose the greater whole. As a participant in the daily experience of these extremes that we all encounter, my reactions and responses drive me to be expansive with my drawing practice. Using a low-fi approach to materials and methods, determinedly acting against monumentality, I consider my process a sort of maximal minimalism.
The work exhibited in Levity takes these ideas as a starting point. It is composed of tiny moments and material representations, like sketches rather than finished drawings. Working with paper, I draw images and then cut into, through, and around what I’ve drawn, freeing the images of their initial bounds. As hybrid drawings, they incorporate a sculptural element insofar as the drawing exists off the page. Layered one upon another or set perpendicular to the wall, for example, the imagery offers a more complex existence for the marks themselves. The drawings are intended to be site-specific, to rely on the architectural surfaces and spaces upon which they are arranged. As sculptural drawings, they exemplify an expansive place and offer the viewer a more interactive sense of the trace, movement, and complexity of the drawn forms.
Drawing plays a most important role in my creative endeavors, having always been the most direct means of expressing my responses to this crazy world we inhabit. From traditional forms of mark-making to these recent sculptural drawing series, it is a process that offers infinite possibilities in my research. This research includes a network of ideas and fields that inform my work and fuel my projects, including (but not limited to) various attempts to unify the infinitesimally small with the most vast universal elements (as in certain kinds of physics); architecture; eastern philosophy; and spatial and perspectival issues in an age driven by technology.
WORKS IN LEVITY EXHIBITION: How Strange It Is To Be Anything, 2006
Installation with Paper and PVA adhesive, dimensions variable
The New Yorker, Goings On About Town - April 2, 2007: DRAWING CENTER
35 Wooster St. (212-219-2166)—For “Levity: Selections Spring 2007,” fourteen participants selected from the Drawing Center’s artist registry liberate drawing from gravity, in one sense or another. Lisa Perez’s paper cutouts hover on the walls, like clustering spores; Norma-Jean Bothmer’s vivid blue drawings of her Teddy bear resist solemnity. Light is the “pencil” that creates the images in Bill Gerhard’s geometric works, purple sheets of construction paper strategically exposed to sunlight. Colored pencils are unleashed in Michelle Oosterbaan’s large-scale drawings, which blend abstract elements with carefully rendered trees. Esteban Alvarez’s video of his cat making a “drawing” with string extends the dialogue to include quadrupedal practitioners. Through March 31. (Open Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 to 6, and Saturdays, 11 to 6.)
