From the Artist: The drawings in the Unnamed Calamity series are meditations on the end of empire. Fragments of architecture (from photographs I take of New York City’s infrastructure) are projected then drawn onto the paper, either remaining throughout as I continue working or eventually erased by turpentine, creating residual layers. As the image is built up the solidity of these structures is undermined, sometimes leaving only suggestions of impact, presence or absence. These pieces are very small— each rectangle that contains the image is 1-15/16″ x 3-1/8″. This size is intended to help render an image of calamity that is all the more intense because it is so minutely concentrated. The materials are spare— ballpoint pen drawings on gessoed paper, and turpentine washes. The remnants of stretching and cutting the paper— brown tape, ruled lines, amplify the sense of the shards of a fading society. These pieces are the newest iteration of my interest in the poetic possibilities that landscape and abstraction offer, but now, size and material work to confine the action and create a distance evocative of loss.

Margot Spindelman will be participating in the 2011 Governor’s Island Art Fair, every Friday, Saturday and Sunday in September. You can visit her (and her work) in Building 12, Section I, 2nd floor, room#2 (BI_F2_R2). More info here: http://4heads.org.

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