Opening reception Thursday, July 15, 6—9 p.m.
Curator's Talk: Saturday, July 17, 2 p.m.
Artist Talk: Saturday, July 24, 2 p.m.

In recent years the medium of drawing has gained in visibility and popularity. As galleries, museums and collectors have become more interested in exhibiting drawings, artists have felt increasingly free to concentrate on drawing as their primary medium.

There are many reasons for this. For one, drawings are seductive, revealing evidence of the artist's hand and offering a direct link to the creative process. This immediacy of drawing and the act of mark making is, for some, a counter to the hectic pace of our lives, often dominated by technology and media overload. Also, from a practical standpoint, drawings can be a more affordable choice for collectors.

Redefining Drawing, guest curated by Rachel Rosenfield Lafo, independent curator and former Director of Curatorial Affairs at the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Massachusetts, focuses on six artists who stretch the traditional definition of drawing by using unusual techniques and unconventional materials to create their art. For most of these artists, the work is characterized by extreme detail and labour-intensive and time-consuming processes.

Playing on the idea of a message in a bottle, New York artist Jim Dingilian coats the interior of glass whiskey bottles with smoke to create drawings of places that are amazingly realistic but also mysteriously suggestive. As we peer through the glass to see the image, it takes shape at the edges of our memory.

Just as Dingilian creates his own worlds inside glass bottles, Carol Prusa (Florida) envisions cosmologies of the universe, creating "domes of heaven" that are a visual embodiment of her scientific interests. She describes the process of her delicate, three dimensional drawings: "Using fabricated acrylic hemispheres that I sandblast and gesso to prepare a curved, geometric ground, silverpoint (a thin silver wre) is used to deposit silver in hatching marks on the gesso layer to create the under-drawing. The underlying forms are heightened with titanium white pigment bound in acrylic polymer to create forms that visually coalesce and simultaneously dissolve in a washed matrix of ground graphite. Fiber optics are added to create a pattern of as many as seven hundred lights programmed to flicker on the surface."

Two of the artists, Kaka Ueda (New York) and Jane Masters (Rhode Island), use traditional craft techniques to redefine drawing. Ueda updates the historical technique of paper cutting, employing an Exacto knife as her tool. She hand-draws imagery onto sheets of paper and painstakingly hand-cuts each piece into lace-like, delicate, organic compositions that feature insects, humans and other references to the natural world.

Masters utilizes a variety of techniques to achieve detailed, patterned compositions. Working with a crafters' wood-burning tool, she burns holes into paper forming decorative patterns and humorous words and phrases like "Nitpicky" and "Don't Try This At Home" that wryly comment on the difficulty and obsessiveness of her artistic process. She also creates etched metal panels and scratchboard drawings that exhibit the same meticulus, intricate patterning and attention to detail.

Kumiko Fujinami of Victoria draws with white gel pens on a black background to create a fine network of loose and densely interwoven lines that recall constellations in the night sky. There is fluidity in Fujinami's working method, as if the lines in her drawings ebb and flow like living beings as she works on them.

Vancouver artist Alan Storey's inclusion in this exhibition represents a different way of redefining drawing. Since the 1980s Storey has invented drawing machines, devices that work within parameters established by the artist that nevertheless result in drawings that are determined by an element of chance. Unlike the work of the other artists in this exhibition, Storey's drawings are not made by hand. Instead, it is the machine that is made by hand and which then creates the drawings. For this exhibition Storey reconfigures one of his signature drawing machines, in which a small battery-operated vehicle drags felt tip pens across stretched white canvases, progressively forming a complex linear drawing. The time-based aspect of the drawing machine allows visitors to watch the drawing develop over the duration of the show.

Redefining Drawing is an opportunity to think outside the box of the traditional definition of drawing, to see that artists continue to reuse and invent old and new techniques and methodologies to make their marks, to spend time looking at the detail and craftmanship of the artworks and to appreciate the aesthetic and intellectual rigor of these six artists.

Betts works on several different projects concurrently, moving back and forth between series and ideas. It is an ongoing exploration of the intersection of the digital realm and the traditional craft of painting, Betts uses various technologies, strategies, and processes to create his work. Born and raised in New York City, Betts graduated from Arizona State University in 1991 with high honors with a B.A. in Studio Art and a minor in philosophy. Between 1991 and 2002 he held various executive positions in the technology field. Before leaving the business world to pursue his painting full time in 2002, he was a senior executive responsible for the European operations of an international application software company. Betts is currently based in Houston, Texas.

Betts was recently awarded Best in Show at the Biennial Southwest at the Albuquerque Museum in New Mexico by Neal Benezra, the Director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In addition, Recently Betts was awarded first place in the Assistance League Celebrates Texas Art 2008 exhibition juried by Kevin Saladino from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In addition, work from this series is included in the upcoming 2008 Houston Area Show at the Blaffer Gallery curated by Claudia Schmukli as well as in New American Talent 23 at the Arthouse Texas in Austin.