Drawing as Portal
Exhibition & Performance
June 26, 2018, The Curateur Collective NYC
https://www.thecurateurcollective.com/

Drawing as Portal: Gesture, Sound is an exhibition featuring Beau Rhee of Atelier de Geste, with Audra Wolowiec, and curated by Emie Diamond of The Curateur Collective. This exhibition explores drawing and notation, gesture and sound in relation to environment. Rhee’s performative drawings and spatial works exist in dialogue with the material qualities of language presented by Wolowiec. Mounted on the core of a frame and stripped of ornamentation, the works are raw and yet reveal a distinctly hedonic wave of movement, oscillating and reverberating within space.

Rhee’s organic forms, sculptural traces, olfaction and lines present a portal into her extensive visual practice. Inspired by biology and her experiences with synesthesia, she activates the viewer’s haptic senses, creating an intimate mise en scène. Further exploring space within a space, there are photographic moments in the room present- ing Rhee accompanied by her collaborators in the atelier. This ephemeral exhibition also highlights several of Wolowiec’s work from her publication Workbook for a Performance which presents a physi- cal representation of sound through score. By way of text extracted from Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves from 1931, Wolowiec incorpo- rates space and breath, transforming language into a poetic, experi- mental sound, and manipulating the meaning of speech.

Both Rhee and Wolowiec are interdisciplinary artists with practices deeply rooted in rhythmic timing, movement, breath and the body in relation to its inhabited ecosystem. A collaborative ‘spatial act’ entitled Thick Air will be performed by both artists.

The human body and Earth are forever inexplicably bound, both consisting of 70 percent water, with 70 percent of the oxygen we take into our lungs produced by the oceans. In a nod to “World Oceans Month” a portion of the proceeds from this exhibition benefit Earth Justice.