What is Lost When Time is Saved: Drawing in Collaboration with the Urban Periphery

I pay attention to the overlooked spaces where land and industry meet, prompting me to wonder what can be gleaned in the oily and cracked urban periphery. With a focus on my hometown St. Louis, this industrial city is my subject matter. And so, I draw in a neighborhood bisected by a highway. I animate with sand near the river confluence on land preserved after a historic flood. I make my own bricks in this Brick City, setting up in locations of former terra cotta clay mines. I sit in the tension of what author Michael Martone calls the “midwestern paradox,” in which “I [feel], simultaneously, my isolation on one of the margins of the world and my connection to what is essential in the scheme of all things.” In this paper, I use four recent artworks to describe my relationship with drawing, time, and site. I expand my methods for image-making by using sand, clay, and metal as drawing materials. Committed to working observationally, I use drawing to slow down and observe what would normally flash through my car window. I work on site to be in collaboration with the landscape and meet passersby who share their stories. I emphasize time’s relationship to the industrialized landscape by inefficiently rebuilding common forms, producing sequenced analog works and making display systems which suggest movement. By emphasizing time in the work, I ask what is lost when efficiency is prioritized.