JACK BUTLER
BLINDFOLD

AUGUST 30 TO SEPTEMBER 23, 2017

Closing Performance by poets Ruth Roach Pierson, Shane Neilson, Jim Nason and Judith McCaffery, who will read from their poems about grieving and loss on Saturday, September 23, 2 - 4PM.

The Red Head Gallery is pleased to present Blindfold, an exhibition by artist Jack Butler.

Drawing blindfold at the service of grief:

Butler exhibits 150 small intimate drawings made to come to terms with his personal  experience  of grieving. As an unedited visual journal, the drawings are arranged by date in a continuous line throughout the gallery.

 “I move the marking pen over a surface that I cannot see. I am drawing in a synaesthetic response to haptic impulses – speed, pressure, gestures, unfolding patterns, often words, sometimes symbols. These  images, visible only to the mind’s eye, play across an imaginary space (a space that often feels much larger than the physical paper could possibly contain).  I am clear about where marks should go in this not-visible picture.

What am I not doing? I am not recording what sight could see.  I am not organizing the representation of space according to pictorial conventions. I am not making decisions in response to aesthetic judgements.

My attention is focused entirely on process. So I do not look at what I have “drawn” for several days, often a week, separating intention from outcome.

When I remove my blindfold, I see surprising pictures that speak directly to me about my experience of grieving, all-be-it in a foreign but strangely familiar pictorial language.

Haptic in the making, visual in the receiving, the two blindfold drawing phases remain entwined for me,  learning, as we all eventually must learn, how to live with grief.” 

- Jack Butler