Page 5 - Scribbles Catalog

Rosemary Meza-DesPlas
Artist Statement
Marks, Strokes, & Scribbles: A Survey of Drawings by Rosemary Meza-DesPlas is an exhibition featuring drawings culled from different bodies of work produced over the past twenty years. Drawing, as a medium, is an important part of my studio practice. While drawings can be produced as quick sketches, preliminary drawings for larger works, and analytical notations, my artworks in this exhibition will reflect ‘drawing’ as the end product – in and of itself.
This exhibition is comprised of hand-sewn human hair drawings, human hair drawings cast in resin, vinyl applique drawing installations, and one on-site drawing installation with conte. The show includes mixed media works encompassing a variety of materials such as: graphite, thread, found book pages, and specialty fabric.
I began to sew with my own hair in 2000. The collection of my hair is a ritualistic activity: I gather it by running my fingers through my hair each morning or by accumulating that which falls out during a shower. Saved hair is stored in plastic bins. Over the years, I have dyed my hair different shades of brown and red to obtain a greater variety of values and tones. There is a meditative quality to sorting hair – as preparatory work – I enjoy the texture of the hair through my fingers. I slide my fingers down its’ length and create work piles correlating to length. Hair is threaded through small embroidery needles. In 2002, I began to embed my hair drawings into 3-layer resin casts. Some recent works have intertwined hand-sewn human hair with thread and collage. By 2018, I began to create hand-sewn human hair drawings with my gray hair. Through the hair drawings, I am present in every artwork — literally. It is as if I have found the answer to living forever because I live on through my hair drawings .... momento mori. The utilization of hair as a vehicle for art-making is informed by socio-cultural symbolism, feminism, and religious symbolism. Sociologist Rose Weitz published a work called Rapunzel’s Daughters: What Women’s Hair Tells Us about Women’s Lives. She examined the hair’s relationship to sexuality, age, race, social class, health, power, and religion. According to Weitz, hair plays a role in our identity because “It is personal, growing directly out of our bodies and on public view for all to see. And it is malleable, allowing us to change it more or less at a whim. As a result, it’s not surprising that we use our hair to project our identity and that others may see hair as a reflection of our identity.” I like the dichotomy of using hair
because there is the idea that hair can be sexy and engaging to people, on the other hand, it can also be repulsive. Consider finding a hair in your soup or a hair on your hotel pillow. When viewers see the drawings in person, they beckon the viewer to move in closer. I have seen gallery patrons be impressed with the technique yet repulsed by the material.
I create drawings on a small and large scale: the personal intimacy of the hair drawings is contrasted by large drawing installations created on-site. In the late 90s, I created an on- site wall drawing installation titled Marianismo at 500X Gallery’s project room (Dallas, Texas). The narrative drawing, created out of conte, covered three walls. At the time I was looking for an artistic challenge in terms of scale and dexterity. Drawing the figurative forms larger than life-size in a loose gestural manner over the course of four days was an exhilarating experience. The drawing materialized through a mere weaving of lines. I was like a circus performer working without a net; I did not know if I could complete the drawing installation in a timely manner and purposely worked without correction tools (erasers or such). This stunt of high intensity drawing would become part of my artistic repertoire. These drawing installations created with conte are notable for their loose gestural marks which interweave and vary in density. Sometimes they incorporate vinyl appliques, liquid graphite, and specialty fabric. Large-scale drawings demand physical exertion: some require intensive drawing of 8-10 hours a day for several days in a row. The necessity of scaling up the human figure for on-site installations is sometimes a daunting task. I do not use opaque projectors, but instead utilize a line gesture to capture the initial image onto the wall surface. Redrawing to change proportions, I leave my early marks as a visible map of the drawing’s development and progression. These ephemeral drawing installations exist for approximately thirty days before being painted over. The impermanent nature of the work is appealing to me. My marks are painted over at the conclusion of each exhibition, yet they live on forever beneath a layer of white gallery paint. I revel in the idea that my mark- making exists somewhere underneath all these walls – my marks frozen into strata. By 2012, I started to experiment with vinyl appliques to create large-scale drawing installations. Drawings were created on the vinyl appliques with archival micron pens or liquid graphite. I would assemble the components together to conceptually envisage large-scale works.
My studio experimentations yield numerous avenues for what a drawing can be; thereby, the definition of drawing is smudged, erased and redrawn. Drawing is a traditional medium, but I expound upon its possibilities and arrive at non-traditional methods for mark-making.