Herald St

Drawn Out

Josh Brand

Matt Connors

Michael Dean

Cary Kwok

Christina Mackie

Sanou Oumar

Diane Simpson

Josh Brand (b. 1980, Elkhorn; lives and works in Brooklyn)

Dignifying the desires of his medium, Brand’s method is not about pointing and shooting, but rather about a process that takes place almost entirely in the darkroom and includes everything from the photogram, film, photocopy, collage and other techniques and materials. - Chris Sharp

Brand mines older traditions and analogue procedures alongside more contemporary visual language to create works that depict representational elements whilst at the same time conveying the abstract. His works, while meticulously planned and dependent on mechanical devices to create, embrace surprise and feel insistently handmade. The resulting images embody a productive tension between the control borne of mastering a craft, and the fortuitousness of the creative process.

Matt Connors (b. 1973, Chicago; lives and works in New York)

Working predominantly in abstract painting, Connor’s practice consists of large and small paintings on canvas, drawings, artist books and painted wood objects. Across his work, equal concentration is given to colour, space and form, and paintings often depend upon each other, bearing traces or imprints of one another. His paintings and drawings are created through a process of layering and re-working forms extracted from his immediate environment. His work often contains influences from an ever-evolving, disparate group of artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians to whom he looks for inspiration; the artworks exist therefore as both pictures and objects, offering depth beneath the surfaces that point both to Connors’ immediate surroundings and to more distant impressions.

Connors will have a solo exhibition at Lismore Castle Arts opening in 2021.

Michael Dean (b. 1977, Newcastle Upon Tyne; lives and works in London)

Dean starts his work with writing, which is then abstracted into human-scale sculptures using industrial and daily materials such as concrete, steel, paper and padlocks. Dean explores the three-dimensional possibilities of language by ‘spelling out’ his words through an alphabet of concrete sculptures, advertising stickers, dyed books, coke cans, plastic bags and casts of his and his family’s fists and fingers. Yet, while paper sheets and thin cement sculptures have already been featured in his installations such as ‘Tender Tender’ (2017) at Skulptur Projekte Münster, this new series of works merge these materials more resolutely. Rubbing an olive oil and lipstick solution onto his lips, Dean kissed sheets of paper in text-like formations, sometimes dusting the marks with cement powder, illustrating how communication is both verbal and physical.

In 2016, Dean was nominated for the Turner Prize for his solo exhibitions at South London Gallery and De Appel Arts Centre in Amsterdam. Dean has recently had solo exhibitions at Progetto, Lecce; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, and at Fondazione Converso, Milan; and recently participated in major group shows at Goldsmiths CCA, London, and at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève. Dean currently has a solo exhibition at Barakat Contemporary, Seoul.

Cary Kwok (b. 1975, Hong Kong; lives and works in London)

“My work, whether it’s my erotic drawings or my period fashion ones, has subtle resonances of racial equality, especially my earlier pieces. I always include people of different cultures and ethnicities in most series of drawings that I make as a gentle and humorous reminder that people of different cultures and ethnicities function and feel (physically and emotionally). Everyone cums the same. It also has a great deal to do with some of the negative experiences I’ve had living in the UK and Europe as a non-white person, but instead of being confrontational I prefer to convey a message gently, with sexuality and my sense of humour.” - Cary Kwok

Having first moved to London to study fashion at Central Saint Martins, Kwok’s work is most notable for its unmistakable style in which meticulous detail is rendered using everyday ballpoint pens, ink, and acrylic. The drawings often depict particular subject matters such as period fashions, hairstyles, women’s shoes, and homoerotica. Referencing symbols from popular culture, the works also contain subtle allusions to issues of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual equality.

Christina Mackie (b. 1956, Oxford; lives and works in London)

Over the last 40 years, Mackie has developed a pragmatic and intuitive approach to her engagement with materials, exploring a range of media including sculpture, watercolour, photography, installation, and ceramics. Meticulous and technical, yet emotional and instinctual, her works explore the material aspects of her chosen medium, testing their objecthood, and using this matter as both a conceptual tool and a tangible investigation into the natural world.

Mackie views her painting practice as a kind of scientific and sculptural process. She likes to think of the paint evaporating and imparting a residue, a detailed study of these works shows the physical build up of pigment on the surface of the paper. As Solveig Øvstebø and Hamza Walker point out in the supporting text for her 2014 exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago “For her, colour is a substance and not a secondary attribute of form.”

Mackie’s paintings are rooted in the landscape, yearly trips to the islands in British Columbia inform a memory and perception of the seascape and the landforms there (Mackie spent much of her youth in Canada) yet she likes to stray from tradition, preferring to reference the landscape through science, ecology and ancient history. Indeed Mackie sees her paintings as a kind of biological artefact, often sourcing naturally occurring, rare pigments and in some occasions making the pigments herself.

Stemming from the same explorational use of pigment and colour, Christina’s Tate Britain Duveen Galleries commission in 2015 was a spectacular installation comprising of large nets that drew coloured dyes up into the rafters eventually leaving a solid residue of the paints that were once liquid.

In 2021, Mackie will have a solo exhibition at Hospitalfield in Arbroath, Scotland. Recent exhibitions include People Powder at Fondazione Antonio Ratti in Como, Italy and Groundwork, National Trust Godolphin, Godolphin Cross, UK.

Sanou Oumar (b. 1986, Burkina Faso; lives and works in New York)

Sanou Oumar’s pen-on-paper works, borne out of his ritualistic daily drawing practice, are architectural, map- like even. Oumar is connected to the act of drawing itself - meditative and healing, his practice helps him come to terms with the emotional and physical displacement he faces as an asylum seeker in the US. And his day-to- day life in New York is present in his works: employing personal possessions as stencils - his ID card, clothing tags, bottle-tops - each drawing possesses secrets and stories through Oumar’s explorations of pattern, colour, and form.

A book of Oumar’s drawings, published by Pre-Echo Press, was released in 2018, and he has recently been included in Phaidon’s ‘Vitamin D3: Today’s Best in Contemporary Drawing’. His first solo show was held at Herald St | Museum St in 2019, and he currently has a solo exhibition at Gordon Robichaux in New York.

Diane Simpson (b. 1935, Joliet; lives and works in Illinois)

Diane Simpson’s elegantly constructed sculptures evolve from a broad range of materials, clothing, and architectural sources, often addressing issues of gender and abstraction. While elements of her creations appear to effortlessly hang and fold, they are in fact the result of a rigorous approach to construction techniques, revelling in passages of pattern, joinery and skewed angles that are by turns humorous and psychologically charged.

Simpson’s sculptures begin as drawings - such as Drawing for Boshi - that visualise details from the history of clothing and design, rotated at 45-degree angles using techniques borrowed from architecture and engineering as well as Chinese and Japanese art. Simpson designed Boshi (the large wall-based work on the following page) as part of a group of “headdresses” that would signify various cultures, first shown at the Chicago Cultural Centre in 1995. The title Boshi (Japanese for hat) and the form represents the shape of the farmer’s hat commonly worn in Japan.

In 2020, Simpson had major solo exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary, UK, and Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, US.

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