3/ WORKS BY KEVIN TOWNSEND

AT BOULDER MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART SPRING 2022 [ VIEW ON BMOCA SITE ]

EXHIBITION TEXT FROM CURATOR PAM MEADOWS

Kevin Townsend’s expanded drawing practice is driven by monumental questions about time, duration, obsession, and mark-marking while simple, small details often animate it. The artist’s meditative works range from intimately scaled, delicate drawings that develop over hours on paper to large, architecturally scaled pieces that evidence days of marking. While the practice of drawing traditionally lends itself to creating a picture or “thing,” Townsend engages this discipline as a document or record of time and memory. Beginning with a single line, the artist draws each proceeding mark in response to the one before it. The result indexes a laboring body’s movement through space and the passing time. On a micro level, Townsend’s drawings are individual, humble marks that accumulate to resemble swarms, clouds, and compressed typographies. Without a definitive edge or ending, each drawing is a boundless meditative performance that traces and archives the passage of time. Townsend’s repetitious, uncomplicated marks are synchronously time-consuming and embracing of chance, allowing his work to exist within a liminal space that is equally structured and organic.

ALL IMAGES: WES MAGYAR

SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS BODY OF WORK, IN MY OWN WORDS

I have a fascination with the way we are marked by time, the way that memory becomes the architecture of our identity and am passionate about exploring various ontologies of drawing. Many of my efforts revolve around variations of traditional concepts of drawing, where a mark is deposited over time onto a flat substrate (a sheet of paper, a panel, window, sidewalk, etc). Other experiments have embraced the concept of  ‘mark deposited over time’ differently, more passively— chalk, ink, ice, teabags, gold leaf, salt, powdered graphite and eraser tailings have all found their way into the works. The drawings whether on paper, envelopes, temporary structures or bathroom walls are one way for me to explore these ideas. They allow me to: engage in drawing as an act, and work with binary oppositions—black/white, full/empty, temporality/permanence, strength/fragility, to make drawings that are simultaneously obsessive, physically demanding, time-consuming and embracing chance. For me, the lines are a humble device, a way to mark a moment, to make a drawing that is a document of intention and attention rather than a drawing that is a picture of some ‘thing’ -these drawings are records. These drawings are conceptual in nature, despite their (sometimes) traditional materials. As this series began I hated every drawing that was being made— but I enjoyed the process and felt confident in the choices I had made to arrive at this place in my work so I kept making them despite my discomfort.

They still make me feel uncomfortable and exposed, but I have come to accept them, and the feelings of vulnerability that accompany them.

Aside from a few simple compositional decisions like paper size, or where the first line will begin, the drawings are unplanned— they evolve extemporaneously and end whenever there is prolonged hesitation. The process is almost meditative, the lines are simply lines, they do not describe a boundary or an edge, they describe a series of moments. When the lines are repeated (each line drawn in response to the line that preceded it) the effect of their accumulation is the emergence of structure— a kind of topographic rendering of time. Without any explicit effort, the drawings begin to suggest volume and space, the use of repetition and accumulation of line alludes to both the passage of time and the processes of memory formation. The topographic structures that emerge conjure the feeling of waves, flowing fabric, or landscape and mirror the way a series of minutes or seconds coalesce in our minds into one unified ‘moment’ or memory.