NYAB Event - Eve Ingalls "Drawing Earth"

Eve Ingalls "Drawing Earth"

Soho20 Chelsea Gallery

This event has ended.

Ingalls’ work is a study of ways in which human cultures secure themselves in space by drawing and redrawing the earth’s surface. Drawing Earth, a major sculpture that gives the exhibition its title, is a 10’ x10’ x 8’ stack built of three-dimensional maps. Its surfaces reveal successive stages of transformation caused by changing human attitudes. It suggests that in the process of scraping, digging, erasing, creating and destroying walls and redrawing boundaries, we draw our fears and desires into the surface of the earth. These drawings leave traces throughout successive layers of cultural development. For Ingalls, the surface of the earth is a place of encounter between nature and human drawing acts. It is a persistent palimpsest.

Ingalls also reminds us that drawing does not always create literal things on this earth. Measuring and locating systems also are often superimposed upon the earth: charts, graphs, and maps are used to help us understand processes that shape our lives. Drawing Earth is suspended from a grid, signaling that the stack is a study site rather than a simple representation of place. Openings left within the surface of each layer become viewing stations through which the viewer can gaze at the drawing of previous layers. In Ingalls’ two-dimensional drawings, the stretched canvas also becomes a grid that measures an archaeological site filled with locating devices.