Construct, 2011 Dowsing Rod Print

I am interested in taking art in a new direction. I am innovative beyond the boundaries of painting and drawing. I am interested in going where visual arts have not gone before. New media, materials and techniques

VISUAL ARTS by SCOTT ROGERS

Strange creaturesCurtis Cutshaw’s subtle, energetic works >>PREVIEW THE DOWSING ROD SERIESRuns until June 16 Curtis Cutshaw Skew GalleryThe link between photography and painting has been explored almost perpetually since the advent of the photographic process in the early part of the 19th century. But photography's connection to drawing has been less well established. It seems inevitable that the growing interest in drawing as practice in contemporary art would lead to some investigation of its relation to photography. Curtis Cutshaw's work, currently on view at Skew Gallery, deals with a heavily mediated hybrid between photography and drawing that nonetheless retains a shadowy connection to modernist painting. The seven works in the exhibition are black framed and of equal size. In the pure whiteness of Skew, they have an eerie quality. This fits appropriately with the vaguely numinous aura surrounding the subject matter of the work. It’s a complex arrangement of methods that begins in performance and ends in a digital image. The performance aspect of the project is dowsing, or more specifically, using a dowsing rod to determine the presence or absence of water. Cutshaw uses this dowsing rod as a drawing tool, attaching a brush to its end and drawing ink across a piece of paper ostensibly guided by the stick and the waters below. From these drawings, Cutshaw then creates a digital image by scanning the image into Photoshop and retouching its colours. The final product emerges as a C-print. The multiple levels of manipulation inherent to Cutshaw's process result in images loaded with expressionistic marks, but conspicuously lacking tactility. Each image is filled with swooping drips and splatters, but the sense of the artist's removal is evident. This creates an interesting juxtaposition between the mark and its representation. By removing the direct contact of ink on paper and leaving only its impression or trace, Cutshaw creates a simulacra-like image. Each photo becomes the empty signifier of drawing. They are the remains of representation after the loss of the original, like the map that came to replace the territory in Borges's parable or Roy Lichtenstein's brushstroke series. What is odd about Cutshaw's work is that despite the separation from the real in his images, a sense of a spectral object is implied. The photos evoke some lost or non-existent 3D thing that is organic, fluid and ephemeral. The images almost take on the appearance of imaginary sea creatures or microscope photos of bacteria. Strange that these abstractions created by duplicating arbitrary marks should imply depth, duration and life. Perhaps Cutshaw's most interesting art historical influence (one that Lichtenstein also drew from) is abstract expressionism, particularly the work of Jackson Pollock. Cutshaw's work is a sly inversion of Pollock's process. For Pollock, technique was a kind channelling, where his body would supposedly take internal creative impulses and distribute them across the surface of the canvas. The distribution of paint became the only content of the painting – an expressive index of the pure artist. This notion of the artist (read: white, straight, male painter) contributed to a mythologizing that still dominates the contemporary art world, often referred to as a cult of the genius. In defiance, Cutshaw's work undoubtedly draws external content into the scenario, thereby making problematic authentic personal expression. Whereas Pollock supposedly took his inspiration from a hermetic internal process, Cutshaw links the creation of his work to a dubious activity associated with natural energies. The implication is that creativity is a complicated social response to the world outside and not simply an isolated incident contained within specific formats or media. As a result, Cutshaw's use of combined media, external energy sources and the avoidance of heroic scale, critique art-world notions of authority in a subtle way.