Sprawl: Sougwen, David Last and Margaret Schedel

Opening: Friday, September 23rd 2011 7-10pm. On view until October 2nd, 2011.

Sprawl is an open edition of live drawing installations hosted at Devotion Gallery which aims to create a momentary graphical map of an intersection between creative improvisation and substructure. Edition one features Sougwen, David Last and Margaret Schedel. Using chalk for its approachable immediacy, Sougwen and David Last improvise an expanding thicket of abstract organic forms, reminiscent of bits of plants, animals, smoke, nerve clusters or rivers seen from the air. Noting the paradox that a limiting structure can provide the most open sense of creative freedom, a faint structure based upon projections of computer-randomized forms is applied to the wall before the performance. The artist's role within this system is to react to the moment, through both visual creative urge and sound inspiration; while using the landscape of pre-defined random activation as a method of sparking inner dialogue. The human mind, being a pattern recognition machine, pulls relationships and structures out of chaos, and the line-sprawl expands like ivy across the walls and ceiling of the space.

 

The performance takes place within an audio environment composed of two elements; an abstract electronic re-interpretation of the sounds of the chalk line strokes themselves, and a 'carrier environment' in the form of abstract and ambient musical sounds. Live abstract/ambient music performances and artist-curated mixes are mixed with the processed feeds from contact-microphones. The sounds not only create the environment the performance is contained in, but another point of inspiration for the artists' crystalization of form.

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