Blueprint, Urbanism on Paper
2000s--
acrylic, ink, and felt-tip pen (some silkscreen) on board
20”h x26 ¼” (diptych)
on paper
acrylic, some ink and felt tip pen, 11’h x 14”w
BLUEPRINT series displays a substrate of the modernist painting in excavated condition: calligraphic line,
color plane, and grid, separated, reserved, stratified, transposed, displaced and reserved again, exploded and, yes, provided with a legend. As a sort of diagram for painting as such, this points to, reveals and expresses a discourse, as written conditions of the way certain paintings are made a text.
Blueprint-Berlin
LINK to EXHIBITIONS at Baumgartner Gallery and Ressle Gallery: installation shots all]
In time and prompted through ongoing conversation with Olivier Gourvil, the BLUEPRINT series developed and ramified, becoming the series PAPER ARCHITECTURE: URBANISM
For Welish and Gourvil, the graphical language of the diagram is very much in evidence here, as both artists explore the implications of the diagram as an abstract machine for analyzing the forces in urbanism or the relations between entities or the margins and inadvertent spaces productive of alternative ways of living. For this collaborative project Gourvil and I asked urbanist Muriel Pagès to supply us with sight-unseen titles. These were the goads to our diagrammatic drawings which issued in the show. Featured are blow-ups from notebooks, which meet at the corner of the gallery room, in cacophony. [LINK to exhibitions]
Of consequence, the ongoing series BLUEPRINT developed substantially, provoked through collaboration, thanks to Muriel Pagès’ suggested titles for both Olivier Gourvil and myself, to become the full-scale exhibition “Urbanism on Paper,” held at the project space La Terrasse, Nanterre, on the edge of Paris. Images from the installation may be seen here:
Press: read the substantial review in Le Moniteur, March 10, 2017
Further press on Nanterre television
A brief preview had occurred through a group exhibition at Anglia Ruskin University, in England, the poster for which used one of the PAPER ARCHITECTURE: URBANISM
Phase_1_Ruskin_Gallery_press.pdf Catalogue available.
EXHIBITIONS
PAPER ARCHITECTURE: URBANISM was the second collaboration collaborative project with Olivier Gourvil, the first being PAPER ARCHITECTURE: WORKING TITLES, for which Olivier and I, long-distance colleagues, sent titles back and forth—titles of architecture impossible to build. (Titles that prompted drawings include: “A Column Falls,” “Pliage,“ ”Door Throughout Wall,” “Colonne Virtuelle,” “Architecture du Papier.”)
This collaboration became an exhibition held at Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, 2005; brochure sponsored by the Fifth Floor Foundation, brochure essay by Joseph Masheck
Images and slide show of the exhibition
Joe Fyfe reviewed this exhibition, at the Slought Foundation and a coincident show at the Baumgartner Gallery in New York, for Art in America.
The dialogue through drawings with Olivier Gourvil worked out so well that we embarked on another, and for this purpose, a prospectus for our concept was a successful presentation to La Terrasse, Nanterre, France, where Urbanism on Paper would take place in 2016-17.