Semblance of Certainty by Toyin Ojih Odutola
Drawing is a distinct process; it can also serve as a mode of documentation or as a preparatory step in many other processes. This allows drawing to point to a past event, create a primary experience in the present, and/or to serve as a model or plan for what is to come. We will explore these multiple uses of drawing and their accompanying temporalities through approaches that emphasis a wide range of formal effects — illusionistic form, space, flatness, mark-making, opacity, transparency – while simultaneously exploring how artists have turned to drawing to record, index, propose, invent, and fantasize.
This course will focus on drawing’s relationship to time. Record, index, propose, invent, and fantasize: drawing can point to a past event, create a primary experience in the present, and serve as a model for a possible or impossible future. We will explore these multiple uses of drawing and their accompanying temporalities through explorations of a wide range of formal tactics that include mark-making, collage, value, space, scale, and gesture.
