Image: Collaboration with Alize Zortuluna
Marking Schemes, presented by The Red Head Gallery, an exhibition by The Drawing Board
JANUARY 12 to JANUARY 22, 2022
Due to provincial COVID-19 restrictions, Red Head Gallery was closed to the public. Updates and work by The Drawing Board can be seen on their socials.
For Marking Schemes, The Drawing Board used Red Head Gallery as a studio/laboratory over a 2-week duration, which included invited artists* to collaborate with The Drawing Board. This process was documented in time-lapse.
Drawing is a primary form of expression and visual communication that uses line, mark-making, and gesture. The medium of drawing is accessible, affordable, universal, and among environmentally sustainable forms of art making. Drawing crosses barriers in ways that support cohesion and communication and still speak critically, thoughtfully, and playfully about the ways power is constructed, transferred, and interrupted.
Collaborative mark-making promotes empathy and shared experiences of making. Drawing as practice opens intuitive, creative, and lateral thinking processes that are necessary to offset the rigidity of institutional culture of policies and regulations, which faculty and artists engage as cultural workers within institutions. Institutional practices and administrative mindsets impact students' creativity and, in turn, their artwork. Institutional practices increasingly shape cultural dialogue and the wider cultural landscape. These cycles of formalized artmaking recirculate among cultural institutions. Institutional commitments intended to implement diversity and inclusion risk becoming the very barriers to knowledge-creation and structural change they were designed to address. With an aim toward building more inclusive contexts in the colonized spaces of academia, the Drawing Board engages artistic methodology and institutional critique to promote systemic change.
The Drawing Board would like to acknowledge the generous support from the Canada Council for the Arts.
*PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Amanda Burk
Erin Finley
Heather Frise
Nichola Feldman-Kiss
Julius Poncelet Manapul
Lyla Rye
Jennifer Wigmore
Amy Wong
Alize Zorlutuna
The exhibition is now over; however, our Instagram page is up to date and because it was always an online experience, the work lives on virtually.
Drawing Board Website:
https://thedrawingboard.format.com/
Drawing Board Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/thedrawingboard.to/
Red Head Gallery link:
https://www.redheadgallery.org/marking-schemes
BIOGRAPHY
The Drawing Board is a collaborative artists group comprised of artist-educators Natalie Majaba Waldburger, Amy Swartz and JJ Lee, exploring the intersection of process, labour, drawing and performance. Our creative dialogue seeks to investigate the complexities of work and working relationships in the context of the institute. The artwork examines the role of drawing, creativity and collaboration mediated by institutional structures while simultaneously examining the historicized construction of racialized and gendered identity in the colonized space.