Marking Schemes

JANUARY 12 to JANUARY 22, 2022

The Red Head Gallery is pleased to present, Marking Schemes, a rental exhibition by The Drawing Board.

Please note with the recent provincial COVID-19 restrictions (as of January 4, 2022), Red Head Gallery is closed to the public. You can see updates and work by The Drawing Board on our socials.

For Marking Schemes, The Drawing Board will use Red Head Gallery as a studio/laboratory over a 2 week duration, which will include invited artists* to collaborate with The Drawing Board. This process will be documented in time-lapse.

Drawing is a primary form of expression and visual communication that uses line, mark-making and gesture. The medium of drawing is accessible, affordable, universal, and among environmentally sustainable forms of art making. Drawing crosses barriers in ways that support cohesion and communication and still speak critically, thoughtfully and playfully about the ways power is constructed, transferred and interrupted.

Collaborative mark-making promotes empathy and shared experiences of making. Drawing as practice opens intuitive, creative, and lateral thinking processes that are necessary to offset the rigidity of institutional culture of policies and regulations, which faculty and artists engage as cultural workers within institutions. Institutional practices and administrative mindsets impact students' creativity and, in turn, their artwork. Institutional practices increasingly shape cultural dialogue and the wider cultural landscape. These cycles of formalized art-making recirculate among cultural institutions. Institutional commitments intended to implement diversity and inclusion risk becoming the very barriers to knowledge-creation and structural change they were designed to address. With an aim toward building more inclusive contexts in the colonized spaces of academia, the Drawing Board engages artistic methodology and institutional critique to promote systemic change.

The Drawing Board would like to acknowledge the generous support from the Canada Council for the Arts.

*PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Amanda Burk
Erin Finley
Heather Frise
Nichola Feldman-Kiss
Julius Poncelet Manapul
Lyla Rye
Jennifer Wigmore
Amy Wong
Alize Zorlutuna

BIOGRAPHY

The Drawing Board is a collaborative artists group comprised of artist-educators Natalie Majaba Waldburger, Amy Swartz and JJ Lee, exploring the intersection of process, labour, drawing and performance. Our creative dialogue seeks to investigate the complexities of work and working relationships in the context of the institute. The artwork examines the role of drawing, creativity and collaboration mediated by institutional structures while simultaneously examining the historicized construction of racialized and gendered identity in the colonized space.