Situated in the art gallery are two identical large plywood objects on castors. These are referred to as Drawing Apparatus Sculptures (DAS) and they are a pair of prototypes based on an easel, but specifically designed to enact continuous blind contour drawing as well as being crafted as sculptural pieces. They require a participant to step onto them and stand in such a way that the drawing surface is side-adjacent to the body, thus making it easier to draw blind i.e. not looking at the drawing surface while drawing. There are left and right handed options for standing on each DAS. A third hybrid sculpture/apparatus is present, utilising similar modular design and scale, also in plywood, that acts as a platform to sit or stand on. Through these objects, audience members are able to choose to draw each other, pose and not draw, or simply observe the action.

On one wall of the gallery, there are two photorealist charcoal drawings that each depict an advertisement by the Celine fashion brand, sourced from the back pages of Frieze art magazine (No.232 & No.234, 2023); one featuring a female model, the other a male model, both standing against a plain background. The drawings have been scaled up from the original A4 magazine page to A1, keeping to this ubiquitous format but enlarged to the standard size for an art class easel. Alongside the enlargement and desaturation of the charcoal pencil, the only other difference is that the images have been rendered back to front—like a slide placed the wrong way in an old slide projector. The Celine brand lettering underneath the image reveals this intervention that would otherwise perhaps go unnoticed. Both drawings are titled FRIEZEENILEC to reinforce the subtle subversion of the image and add a clue as to the subject matter’s origin. The drawings are unframed but presented using drawing clips on plywood panels that are two-part mechanisms/artworks that allow for an easy separation from the wall so that the drawings can be transferred to the DAS and back again. The mechanisms are considered as artworks because when separated, half the mechanism still operates as an art-object on the wall projecting into space and contributing to the overall spatial dynamics of the exhibition.

These two image-based drawings are also the starting surfaces to be further drawn upon by audience members, utilising blind contour drawing techniques via the DAS, at the opening event of the public exhibition. To further signal this activity, there is one other completed drawing in the exhibition. Titled Celine on Celine, it features another drawing of a Celine advertisement taken from Frieze (No. 233, 2023) and already has blind contour and half-blind figure drawings over the top. These over-drawings are of another local artist whose name is also Celine. As a form of collaboration, she has signed her name over the brand of the same name. The drawing also conflates the Celine ad with Frieze’s bimonthly online editorial heading, The Argument, across the top in drawn text, bringing their shared context of the magazine even closer together. There is also one further drawing-based intervention, in that the surface has two different sized squares incised out of it, creating two areas of negative space as a form of redaction.

On the exhibition opening night, the artist begins the process of blind contour drawing as part demonstration and part performance. One of the drawings is taken from the wall mechanism and slotted onto a DAS, which is on castors and is pushed towards the audience, scattering many but enticing a few to stay still. The artist takes a stick of willow charcoal from his breast pocket, steps up and begins a blind contour drawing of the first still audience member his eyes land on. The drawing is quite measured, timed to the movement of the eye tracing the contour of the body, and it takes about two minutes to complete. The artist is singing waiata (traditional Māori song) to himself but audible to the audience. Those that may recognise the waiata or understand the words are hearing greetings, invocations, songs for children, love songs and laments. The songs act as a form of timing, all being roughly two minutes in duration, but they also act as a call to attention, bringing the space and people together, creating a performative atmosphere for the here-and-now. After each drawing and accompanying waiata, the artist moves the DAS sculpture to a new position before starting to draw again. After having completed a handful of blind drawings and navigated the majority of the gallery space, the artist steps down and offers the charcoal stick to the audience as an invitation to participate in the drawing’s completion.

When this activity is well underway, the artist takes the second drawing from off the wall and places it on the other DAS for further audience participation. Then, when those present have had a chance to participate and the drawings are deemed to be complete, the artist takes them from their respective DAS and places them back on the wall mechanisms, thus signalling that the drawing event is complete. The combined elements can now be viewed as individual artworks (separate static sculptures and drawings), or equally, as a trace of activity, an aftermath of the event. Either way, this exhibition is a reimagining of the drawing lesson, utilising the gallery as a site of drawing production. The performance, drawings and sculptures investigate the parameters and temporalities of expanded drawing and engage with the theory of the pensive image, otherwise known as the thinking artwork.

So what is the exhibition all about? Why drawings of Celine advertisements and why let others draw over them? What is meant by the term pensive image and what has it got to do with hybrid easel sculptures? French philosopher and professor Jacques Rancière, posits the term pensive not as a brooding, thoughtful silence, but as a form of resistance, tension, and indeterminacy. For Rancière, it is something inherent in images that resists interpretation and consensus. It is a problematising of the gap between two ideas of the image: the common notion of the ‘image as duplicate of a thing and the image conceived as artistic operation’.¹ Duplicating advertising imagery through drawing brings a heightened perceptual awareness to the content. Combining this with academic drawing—as a set of conditions to design, construct and enact functional sculpture—generates and expands drawing ideas to explore the threshold of believable absurdity. Not obviously absurd and not quite unequivocally believable either.

These artworks are the result of looking for ways to quilt together differing temporalities of image, object, and body, by traversing the materialities of photorealism, blind contour drawing, spatial construction, and interactive performance. The latter explores how the art gallery can be integrated as a site of production that utilises the sociality of the opening night as a performative event. The intention is to discover ways to keep the drawn outcomes in a pensive state of provisional indeterminacy by not privileging one mode of representation over another. To do so a sense of ambivalence, what I referred to as believable absurdity, is necessary to cultivate. The ambivalance is not an either/or attitude, but points to the simultaneity of two oppositional thoughts of equal importance that threaten to cancel each other out. This notion of ambivalence mirrors the conflation of the two elements of pictorial source material and/or object forms together to see what happens when they collide.

Expanded drawing is not a new term, nor is utilising the ‘gallery as site’ a ground breaking approach. Both are extrapolated from Rosalind Krauss’ seminal 1979 essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field, which examined contemporary art practices of the time that focused on the relationship between sculpture, landscape and architecture.² Utilised in the context of drawing, Krauss’ expanded field identifies artworks that are situated between traditional drawing and other disciplines and practices. My particular take on expanded drawing, however, is not intended to stretch what constitutes drawing, nor is it to include new media or technological advancements. Rather, it is to examine how established academic forms of drawing can be reimagined within a conceptually driven, sociopolitical framework.

To explore Rancière’s notion of the pensive image through drawing methodologies, existing images that already have a place in the world are starting points for photorealist drawings that further operate within expanded drawing as a whole. For pensivity to be induced, there first needs to be axiomatic points of understanding from which to then create indeterminacy. Fashion advertising provides this visual platform. Photorealist drawing plays an important role as a drawing method that heightens a viewer's focus on an image but in the context of this exhibition, it is also intended to be disrupted. Further explained by Rancière, pensive imagery can be understood as ‘regimes of expression that intersect, creating unique combinations of exchange, fusion and distance’.³ The performative approach that disrupts the photorealist drawings differs to many artists within the field of representational drawing who would not entertain the idea that their artworks may be improved by interventions such as an audience member’s blind contour mark.

Photographic images co-opted for art-making purposes always retain referential echoes relating to their spatiotemporal origins (where and when they were taken), as well as what they were taken for: including authorship, copyright and the original intention of the photographer or intended function of the image. The process of translation from an image's inception to its co-option in a drawing charts a range of new spatiotemporal conditions of the image. In the case of this project it begins with a person modelling for a photographer in the studio, the selected image then undergoes post production that treats the image differently between being printed in a magazine or viewed on the screen. Subsequently there is my act of drawing. This temporally separates the image from its inevitable commercial obselescence by ‘stretching’ the image out with the time it takes to represent it photorealistically; the presentation of it as a surface to further draw on as a performative event; the aftermath and heightened scrutiny as an artefact in a gallery; and the documentation in an art publication and so on. Each iteration feeds off the prior one while continously circling back or connecting across, creating further opportunities for conveying and shifting interpretations of the image. This is key to the pensive image—it is always thinking.

Drawing from photographic images is also an established way to revalue the original image. This includes interpreting the image on a sliding scale from celebration at one end to outright criticism at the other. The conceptual space where these supposed oppositions overlap or collide is often the most interesting for an artist to occupy. The indeterminacy of the pensive image is a deliberate complicating of what may be perceived as the intention of the artist. As the Drawing Center (NYC) curator Claire Gilman states ‘Just as copying photographs undoes the neutrality of the original document, so too does the photograph check the authorial impulsive drawing’.⁴ In other words, an artist cannot divest oneself of intention nor control interpretation, just as much as one cannot be entirely culpable or blameless, fully deserving of accolades or deemed lacking in talent. To counteract the concomitant issue of what then to draw, given how it might be interpreted as authorial, one can set limits, similar to how academic drawing exercises have instructions. Limits function as ‘necessary conditions that allow for the possibility of an alternative, of something in excess of or beyond the parameters of what is taken as given’.⁵ In other words, limits (somewhat ironically) spawn further alternatives. They hone and shape artistic intention and production in a similar way to a scientific hypothesis. They help to resist the extremes of both didactic and poetic interpretations while simultaneously engaging with the construction of meaning. Limits, in turn, form strategies or conceptual parameters for the act of drawing. Strategies ‘embrace tactics for engineering visual invention’ and help to bring together heterogenous contexts.⁶ Celine on Celine for example, contains parameters that brought the work into existence, yet one cannot join the points of connection fully together to create an understanding. There is some form of intentionality and critique at the outset but this is disrupted by the set limits that, unbeknownst to the viewer, dictate certain methodological decisions that are inconsistent with a singular reading of the work.

Expanded drawing, in this case, can thus be a form of sociopolitical critique as well as a celebration of process and technique. In particular, by interrogating the interrelated commercial advertising strategies of art-and-fashion by exposing their inherent contradictions whilst simultaneously celebrating the act of drawing and an expanded community of drawing practice. Imagery from fashion advertising within art magazines are utilised for photorealistic drawings, not merely for their high production levels (although these do help) but because their presence in an art magazine is worth critiquing. The fashion advertisement in an art magazine exposes a schism between editorial content—such as artists who address socio-economic injustice and capitalist critiques—and high fashion or luxury goods. This dialectic in itself leads towards the ‘alterity and interconvertibility’ inherent in images, where fashion houses seek to correlate their product with contemporary art as an integrated picture of wealth and taste.⁷

The critique of capitalist structures through fashion conglomerates and art magazines is not central here to create new possibilities through art, and an artwork should never be limited to merely illustrating a point. As much as it is eye opening to follow the accumulation of fashion houses by competing french billionaires Bernard Arnault (LVMH) and François-Henri Pinault (Kering) —and amusing to follow their seeming insistence on pinching the same creative director (Hedi Slimane) back and forth, and Slimane, as a photographer himself, insisting on advertising, regardless of whichever brand he is in charge of, in the first or last pages of various art magazines—it is not what is at stake in these artworks. Rancière states ‘The images of art do not supply weapons for battles. They help sketch new configurations of what can be seen, what can be said and what can be thought.’⁸ The configurations within my drawings act as a provocation for how we understand images, rather than try and unravel the complicated relationship between art as a reflection of society and art as a commodity within society. 

When utilising the spatiotemporal systems of international art magazines as parameters for selecting images, the encounter becomes an important term to consider. The etymology of the word is contra in Latin, encontre in Old French. Both mean against or in opposition, which together with its modern interpretation—to come upon or meet casually or unexpectedly—creates its own kind of ambivalence. The comparably ephemeral encounter with an image when flicking through a magazine becomes recontextualised and slowed down through drawing. The drawing apparatus sculptures help to introduce additional temporal encounters that traverse the original function of both imagery and object. In tandem they open possibilities of the image interpretation and activate a new live, and shared encounter with the results. The DAS are conceptualised as conditional on the ergonomics of their proposed function (blind contour drawing), yet they are purposefully aestheticized to be registered (circularly) as a sculptural form. Less functional than an actual easel but not entirely successful as purely formalist sculpture either. The intention is to find a not-quite-right tipping point. To sit somewhere nonsensically, or sense-resistant, between apparatus, sculpture, and three-dimensional drawing. Author Caroline Levine extrapolates on a similar phenomena when she talks about affordances (the potential uses of things in design theory) and constraints as forms. She states,

Each constraint will encounter many other, different organizing principles, and its power to impose order will itself be constrained, and at times unsettled, by other forms.⁹ 

The DAS are an embodiment of deliberately pursuing these encounters and collisions of form, both formally and socio-politically.

Modes of drawing also address the inherent condition of time within drawing practice. Academic drawing exercises utilise limits such as method, media, and duration, to hone perception and/or encourage expression. Duration therefore becomes an integral part of any drawing exercise and is one of the fundamental aspects of drawing as a field of practice. As stated by the late artist, writer, and curator Deanna Petherbridge, ‘the binary oppositions that pull drawing between extremes—sketchy and finished; spontaneous and measured; self-generating or outwardly directed... are linked by the moving line of drawing itself’.¹⁰

The different modes of drawing that exist under this particular umbrella of expanded drawing, create an idiosyncratic sliding scale of time in relation to the execution of drawing. At either end there is the slow process of photorealism and the quick gestural mark of the blind contour line. Yet in the middle there is also the speculative and constructive design of the apparatus sculptures, and the spatial outcomes themselves that can be thought of as drawing in 3D. Especially given that the planar qualities of the plywood align closely to the way geometric drawings are outlined on paper and the handmade construction process allows for decision making to continue throughout the process much like a 2D drawing.

There is a stage in my 2D drawing process that requires some form of digital preparation for translation in traditional media. This stage can also lead to further intervention or subversion of the image such as inverting, flipping, conflating or redacting elements to find a point of believable absurdity. For me, these interventions work best when the imposed limits dictate a simple but effective shift. Within this activity (also considered as drawing) there are sometimes images that resist any intervention and present themselves as a kind of digital readymade. These images often have accidental formal connections to adjacent images through their full colour palette (thus resisting desaturation through charcoal) whilst presenting ideological juxtapositions between the editorial content and the advertising.

Utilising the gallery as site also requires thinking through the politics of space, to understand the different social and spatial dynamics that occur in the public and private sectors. Although the gallery as a general space tends to attract an artistic audience overall, these audiences vary between gallery type. A dealer gallery may have collectors, as well as family and friends with limited drawing experience; whereas a gallery inside a tertiary art education provider is likely to have a higher ratio of student visitors with developed artistic abilities. The size and architecture of each gallery is also a key element to consider before enacting a drawing event. The work presented at Melanie Roger Gallery, Auckland, in July 2024, was an opportunity to examine some of these differences and in particular, how the end results operated as artefacts in a dealer gallery environment. It was also an opportunity to utilise the unique elements of the site to play with subtle humour. Similar to Celine on Celine, the new work produced for this exhibition, MRMR, had a similar tongue-in-cheek approach with the initials standing for Margot Robbie (drawn posing for Chanel in Frieze magazine) and Melanie Roger herself. In this way, the work is literally connected to the space it was completed in. 

The different modes of drawing (and titling) are also the tools of disruption. Starting with a photorealistic drawing and overlaying it with a blind contour drawing disrupts the efficacy of the original image to advertise the fashion items worn by the models. The added complexity of letting the gallery audience participate in the blind contour drawing, offers further disruption and at the same time makes further connections as a community of drawing practice. The reticence, discomfort, or enthusiasm and excitement an audience member might feel when considering whether to contribute to these works through drawing, is both an embodiment and an extension of the politics of the image itself. Humour, as a regime of expression, over time, can help entice an audience to feel like it is okay to participate. It also helps to differentiate from the brooding notion of the pensive image to one that embraces all forms of thinking.