The Projective Drawing

The exhibition is inspired by the book The Projective Cast, published in 1995, in which the architectural historian Robin Evans proposes a new explanation of our way of "seeing" architecture by including all the different facets, at the mental, physical and emotional levels, that make up the human experience of the built. In The Projective Drawing, curator Brett Littman applies Evans's skeptical view of drawing as a means of understanding the foundations of architecture, to challenge our understanding of how drawing technique works in contemporary culture by highlighting artists whose drawings ask visitors to activate a complex matrix of non-traditional ideas in their interpretation of the works on display.

Lionel Favre, Keita Mori, Judith Saupper have created site-specific installations that redefine the art of drawing, requiring the visitor to move in, around, or even under the works to fully experience them. Brigitte Mahlknecht's drawings go beyond conventional geometry by constructing contemporary visual spaces that can only exist suspended in our imagination. Leopold Strobl, who works with the Gugging Gallery in Vienna, creates miniature landscapes on old newspapers. Dark voids, emblematic of Strobl, which partially obscure the landscapes drawn, invite the visitor to contemplate the essentially partial and unfinished nature of the drawing.

The Projective Cast also features artists who use drawing to visualize biological systems and abstract structures. The drawings created from plant extracts by shaman Sara Flores of the Shipibo Conibo tribe in Peru, are deeply linked to her relationship with the natural world and the ayahuasca healing rituals she performs. Kunihiko Moriguchi, a kimono maker and National Treasure in Japan, makes hundreds of abstract designs in search of patterns he can use for his unique clothes. Similarly, William Cordova's collages and drawings combine images to represent the body's relationship to vernacular architecture, sounds, popular culture and politics. Raha Raissnia's drawings are based on images from her personal archive of photographs and films that she either made herself or found. Intuitively, rather than making direct copies, Raissnia makes these images abstract by striving to photograph and draw them many times until they become unrecognizable and their primary meaning becomes uncertain.