Lines and Lines and Lines
By:
February 28, 2011
[Plexus 4, Gabriel Dawe, 2010]
When is a line not a line? When there are many of them. With his threaded installations, fiber artist Gabriel Dawe produces extensive linework to create a vague blur. Individual pieces can use up to 50 miles of thread.
[Plexus 3, Gabriel Dawe, 2010]
[detail, Plexus 2, Gabriel Dawe, 2010]
With this many lines, the resulting artworks move away from Sol LeWitt, away even from planes or other strict geometries, and closer to smoke puffs.
[Wall Drawing 273 Lines to Points on a Grid, Sol Lewitt, 1975]
[Tube (magnetic tape, plywood), Zilvinas Kempinas, 2008]
[Smoke puff, Filippo Minelli, 2010]
Smoke puffs are a current trend in ephemeral art, or at least its documentation. You release a puff of colored smoke into any environment (could be anywhere, but seems to be more common in forests or fields), then photograph the result before it disperses completely.
[Smoke puff, Filippo Minelli, 2010]
[Smoke puff, Noah Kalina]
[Colored smoke, HELMO]
The thread installations would also be interesting in shades of grey; they might provoke some optical illusions as we interpret dark as shadow, and white as highlight. Whereas with smoke puffs, there’s the risk that greyscale might just reduce to, “where’s the fire?”
[Smoke puff, Noah Kalina]