 "October 2002, Making History"-series ink on paper, 10.25 x 10.25 inches Martin Wilner 2002: Making History This suite of twelve pen-and-ink drawings organize around the months of the solar calendar. Calendars function as accepted conventions of conversion of time into two-dimensional space. Wilner adopts this convention to create a historical narrative in monthly units. On each day of the month in 2002 he executed a drawing based upon world events. The images were appropriated and adapted from daily newspapers. Over the course of each month a collage of drawings converge to create a larger visual narrative. Meaning is quilted together from images drawn at specific times. Accidental juxtapositions create spontaneous, new meanings. Never knowing what would happen next, his calendar drawings become a personal history played out as a reverse game of "exquisite corpse." The combination of fixed variables, such as the format of the Roman calendar, and the element of chance creates a dramatic tension that animates the work. With these drawings, Wilner continues to explore his ongoing interest in the communication of the dimension of time in his art. It is part of a personal effort to counter the sense of weltschmerz he associates with the ongoing ticking of the clock in an increasingly frightening world. His past exhibition, "Self-Analysis," consisted of daily self-portraits painted for an entire year. His ongoing "Journal of Evidence Weekly" is a series of books of drawings executed while traveling on the subway, wherein the drawing's completion is determined by the completion of the trip. In discussing this project with artist Joe Coleman, Coleman associated this daily endeavor with a prisoner marking the days of his sentence on his cell wall. Wilner sees the calendar drawings as an opportunity to lend meaning to those marks. As marks made over the days of the month, they create a kind of visual history. In the words of dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, "it is no mystery, we making history." Martin Wilner has had one-person exhibitions of paintings at Gallery Schlesinger in 1999 and Elizabeth Dee Gallery in 2000. Exhibition: 3.1. - 3.2.2003 Gallery hours: Fr - Mo 12 am - 6 pm and by appointment PIEROGI 2000 Gallery 2 177 North 9th Street USA-Brooklyn, NY 11211 Telephone 00718 599 2144 www.pierogi2000.com |
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