ABSTRACT
Drawing, as discipline, object and action, tangibly sites the communal gesture. As a drawn gesture points to a moment in time and a movement in space, so too may it generate openings for aesthetic and social engagement, exchange and invention. Open Gestures begins as a private creative act that is released to public participation through physical touch. Tractus is a group drawing that operates as a collaborative gesture, an experiment in common marking; while Batir takes a gesture-rich communal experience as its point of departure and translates it into a solitary studio practice driven by somatic memory. In the series Open Gestures: Active Drawings, each piece affords a different opportunity for a participant to interact with or alter the image through his or her bodily contact. 'Excavation' is the interactive piece in the series that most explicitly raises awareness of how the gestures of drawing are initiated, repeated, interpreted and re-expressed on the drawing's skin.
