From Drawing System to Apparatus

Perspective, orthographic, and axonometric drawing systems can be understood as frameworks that organize the pictorial space of a drawing. Historically, these frameworks have been materialized as physical apparatuses used as a means to illustrate projective drawing systems, e.g. Albrecht Dürer's woodcut of The Draughtsman of the Lute. In this example, the woodcut simultaneously illustrates and establishes the authority of the drawing method, as the illustration of one point perspective is drawn within a one point perspective. The illustration, the apparatus, and the image all corroborate the validity and accuracy of the drawing system so that their correspondence creates a visual “proof”.

In my work, my externalization of system into an apparatus is not an act of systematic proof, but instead is a search: a means to bend familiar drawing systems and mechanically place them in corporeal space for experimentation. These steel and wood frameworks become apparatuses that create conditions of discovery. They are ghosts of the rigid mathematical systems of pictorial space that typically lock drawing systems into place, but by their materialization, they allow for types of systematic experimentation, somewhat unique to each apparatus.

The work is ongoing, but this early photograph remains a touchstone. Although clearly a moment in a messy process, the emergence of the idea that an apparatus can be both a means for drawing system alignment and displacement can be seen in the iterative work present in the image.