HAMBURG.- Drawing Room is presenting the exhibition For Now, featuring existing and newly produced works by the internationally renowned artists Jill Baroff and Stefana McClure. In this two-person exhibition, the artists explore notions of temporality and demonstrate how the concept of time is integrated into the structure and methodology of their respective conceptual and minimalist practices.
In her works, Jill Baroff describes patterns of movement that run through nature. Some of the works on display, such as the four-part piece International, 2026 from the series Tide Drawings, make time visible through measurements, whilst others approach the same theme through perception rather than data. The erasure and reconstruction of information, as well as the condensation of time, are characteristic of Stefana McClure’s work. Her keen interest in language, literature and film is visible and palpable in every piece, as seen, for example, in the works from her films on paper series. Although the subtitles become illegible through McClure’s transformative process, each work carries within it the energy of the dissected film.
The title of the exhibition, For Now, is taken from a poem by the Irish poet and current Poet Laureate of Ireland, Vona Groarke, who urges us to “marshal attention, allow the day to dissolve, as it does, in the nothing of our doing and the nothing we have done.”
Jill Baroff and Stefana McClure live and work in New York. Their works are held in numerous public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Folkwang Museum, Essen; the Menil Collection, Houston; the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main; the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
Some words from Jill Baroff about her works in the exhibition:
The works presented in the show describe patterns of movement that stream through nature. Some of these works make time visible through measurement. Others in the exhibition approach the same problem through perception rather than data.
Pacific is part of an ongoing series of works, the Tide Drawings. The diptych visualizes two consecutive days of the movement of water near Seattle, Washington. At one-minute intervals, the space between each line represents the changing height of the sea’s surface level over a period of 24 hours. Duration becomes visible as spatial form.
International is also part of this body of work. Like the clocks in an international business’ lobby, each drawing represents the same day’s tides in four different locations. In this case, New York City, Cuxhaven, the Elbe Estuary, Los Angeles and London.
The two drawings from the series, Six Degrees of Separation, are made by overlays of two passes of rotating grids. In the more open of the drawings, two grids are drawn on a sheet of Japanese gampi, one on the front and one at a six-degree turn on the back of the paper. The denser of the yellow drawings is made with two sheets of paper. Each has a 3 mm grid drawn. The pages are then mounted on top of each other with one layer pivoting six degrees. Morning and Evening begin when the sun is six degrees below the horizon.
Something in the Way She Moves is an overarching title for a body of work that moves away from strict data forms and allows for a more poetic approach.
The Tide Drawings render rhythms in nature through measurement. In the corrugated dial series, the grooved surfaces catch and refract light so that color and shadow shift gradually across the face of each dial as the day changes, rendering monochrome multifaceted. Instead of diagramming duration through measurement, these works allow time to appear through changing light.
Some words from Stefana McClure about her works in the exhibition:
Much of my work makes reference to the structure and visual properties of written language. Although the “text” is sometimes obliterated or partially dismantled, the meaning is always as important as the visual form. Distillation of time and obliteration and reconstruction of information characterize my drawings and sculptures. The work has a self-structuring methodology: visual form being determined by the process by which it is made.
From 1986 to 1998 I lived in Kyoto, studying the language and traditional arts, traveling to remote paper-making villages, working as a writer, translator and editor, and, ultimately, thanks to a timely scholarship from the Japanese government, devoting myself to the study of Japanese paper and paper-making at Kyoto Seika University.
During this period I watched a lot of film, especially foreign film, and, as I rented most of these from my local video store, they were typically subtitled in Japanese. I have always been fascinated by the gray area that exists between languages and cultures and so was naturally drawn to discrepancies in translation. Not mistakes, exactly, but, specifically, the Japanese translation of female dialogue was consistently softer than in the original language. It was odd to watch strong Western women ending their sentences with tag questions or with phrases like “perhaps” and “I wonder” and I couldn’t help thinking about the distorted impression a non-native speaker would get of the film as a result.
Films on Paper, a body of work I have been developing over the past twenty-five years, is informed, at least in part, by this experience. These drawings methodically remove all of a film’s subtitles, inter-titles or closed captions from a rich monochromatic ground, taking care to ensure that the information removed is formatted exactly as it appeared on the monitor on which the film was originally viewed.
Made of transfer paper mounted on cotton rag, or, more recently, dibond, the drawings are minimal compositions of two blurred lines at the bottom of a monochromatic field and consist of the superimposition of the subtitles or closed captions of an entire movie.
To make the drawings I watch a film frame by frame, systematically inscribing all of the subtitles on top of one another on a ground of transfer paper. The process is subtractive: the surface of the paper is slowly eroded as successive layers of information are transferred off. Hours of translated dialogue are reduced to a ghost form, dense in the middle, fading towards the edges. The hypersensitivity and intrinsic memory of the transfer paper enable these multi-layered works to become palimpsests with the iridescent glow of high-tech video screens.
A few of the films showcased here: Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s film The Circle traces the arc of a woman’s life through seven female characters who cross paths, by chance or design, on the streets of Tehran over the course of a single day. Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blind Chance uses time to explore existential contingency, branching into three separate scenarios, presented here as a series of three drawings, based on whether or not the protagonist succeeds in catching a train. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc, condenses the martyr’s four-and-a-half month trial and the hours leading up to her execution into the timeframe of a single intensely focused day.
For the past few decades I have been deconstructing books, often lengthy ones such as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick or the ‘80’s edition of Rand McNally’s Reader’s Digest Atlas of the World, reconfiguring them as continuous balls of string. For this body of work, I have always been drawn to material so compelling that it constitutes a complete world unto itself.
The sculptural drawings shown here reconfigure a series of Circadian Novels, novels that take place over the course of a single day: Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf, a June day in 1939; The Hours by Michael Cunningham, another June day, this time for three different women in three different eras; Haruki Murakami’s After Dark, a single winter night in Tokyo from 11 pm to 6:45 am; Intimacy by Hanif Kureishi, also more night than day, this time in 1990s London; Peter Hujar’s Day, everything Hujar did on 18th December, 1974; Orbital by Samantha Harvey, a single day in mid-October during a near-future, indeterminate year; and Saturday by Ian McEwan, the events of February 15th, 2003.
The hag stones, from an ongoing series of protest stones embracing poetic politics, take the form of two poetry-wrapped stones, one for each pocket, ready to be thrown. Contemporary Korean poet Kim Hyesoon’s poems are direct, visceral, confrontational, and often deliberately grotesque. They are fractal and full of holes, making the hag stone — a stone with naturally occurring holes created by thousands of years of water erosion — the perfect carrier of her words. The hope is that the words of Girl, Your Body Has So Many Holes for Straws gain literal weight and even the anticipation of action and violence from their supports.
Jill Baroff and Stefana McClure live and work in New York. Their works are held in numerous public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Folkwang Museum, Essen; the Menil Collection, Houston; the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main; the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
