Arch 2 gallery show surviving logic delights, astounds

EVAN JOHNSON STAFF

“It changed the way I see the world. Without being melodramatic about it — it actually did,” said U of M architecture professor Mark West about the process of creating his drawings and collages, currently on display in the Arch 2 Gallery. The show, entitled Surviving Logic comprises works of various sizes and spans roughly 25 years of West’s drawing and collaging endeavours.

Part (but certainly not all) of the striking effect of West’s work is a result of the different techniques he uses. A series of three dark drawings, to my mind the most beguiling works in the show, achieve their effect with the help of a type of blackout technique. “There’s an image under each of those that’s completely covered in graphite, and then it’s an excavation by erasure,” explained West. Each of the three drawings appear at first to be a jumble of strange, meticulously rendered strings and whatsits, though one soon realizes that the seemingly random contours in fact subtly delineate a woman’s torso.

“To me, they’re not properly images,” said West, about his works. “The image was never the issue, the image was the occasion.” Though the creative focus in creating the drawings was on process, the resulting images hardly suffer. Rather, as is often the case when an artist focuses on process, the results are all the more strange and wonderful for not having been the direct goal.

Collaging, for West, was what really got him started on this kind of creation. “You have a whole new, limited willful role,” he said. “I started getting collage-eyes. I was walking around the world and I wasn’t looking at things for what they were, but for their potential. I would leaf through magazines and I was no longer even looking at what the image was — it would register briefly then disappear. During those years I was walking around with a little razor blade in my pocket so if I happened to see an intense image in a doctor’s office or something, I could get it.”

Apart from the collages, all the works in the show have been created with graphite. “I have a good, intimate relationship with graphite,” said West. “The fact that it’s a crystalline form of carbon is just a nice, mysterious, fakespiritual coincidence.”

Although the drawings are beautiful to look at, West stressed their functionality. “Those drawings were never made to be shown,” he said. “They were done to do and, basically, the power of making those kinds of things alters your perception of the world. To put it just completely flatly, that’s exactly their function. Pay attention and all of a sudden there are all these other possible worlds that are interior to the ones that you think that you see. This is a distant planet.”

Surviving Logic can be seen at the Arch 2 Gallery in the Architecture 2 building until Dec. 15.