DENSITY SCARCITY Feature Artist: Michelle Weinberg



This week's DENSITY SCARCITY Feature Artist is Michelle Weinberg (New York, NY), with Swells (2021, carbon transfer on mulberry paper, 18” x 36”).


These drawings are made by slipping carbon paper between folded sheets of mulberry paper, which transfers imagery from one side of the page to the other in a kind of pseudo printing process, creating half-tones. The used black carbon papers are "negatives" engraved with the layered residue of drawing marks over time.

Making drawings with carbon transfer papers is one of the "engines" of drawing that I've enlisted over the years such as: rubber stamps, marbleizing and suminagashi, iron-on transfer, tracing paper.) All are handmade technologies that invite chance to play a role. The drawings have a printed/engraved look and feel, with a range of half-tones and partially ghosted images, so I sometimes feel they can also be described as monoprints. The carbon papers retain all the marks made, and these are transferred as I work, layering one drawing with the marks of another. These processes involve me in both composition and dissolution simultaneously. Specific intentional marks erode and disintegrate into abstract signals, eventually skeins of static. When I pasted the carbon papers to the windows of my studio, the daylight making them visible, I began to experiment with light boxes. The illuminated carbon papers are an x-ray, compressing all the thoughts and ideas that might be occupying my imagination during a period of work. A cross-section of my imagination from a certain span of time.

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DENSITY SCARCITY is a virtual exhibit on @spatial.io that runs through November 1, 2023.

#worksonpaper #markmaking #contemporarydrawing #drawingandtime #accumulations #carbonytransfer #ghostimages

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