Christine Hiebert’s “Reconnaissance: Three Wall Drawings,” a site-specific wall installation, will be on view at the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, through June 2010. Reconnaissance responds to and interacts with the complexity of the light-filled monumental Tanner Gallery designed by Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, also taking into consideration the fifth-century Antioch mosaic permanently mounted on the gallery wall.
Curator Elizabeth Wyckoff writes about the piece: “Utilizing the language of line on a large scale, Hiebert’s art is an exploration of the space: she draws, articulates, and redefines it, evoking a personal, metaphorical, architectural space of her own. Hiebert’s drawings happen directly on the wall in the gallery, intuitively and in the moment.
Composed of blue adhesive tape as well as paper rolled with ink, this multi-part work expressively commands and engages the monumental architectural space of this top floor gallery.”
While creating the work at the Davis, Hiebert spent much of her time walking around the 4000-square-foot room and riding in an elevated lift – as high as 30 feet up into the light-filled vaults, developing a feeling for the room.
“For me, drawing starts with the problem of the line, how to form it and how to follow it,” writes Hiebert. “In a way, it ends with the line, too. The line remains independent, searching, never completely absorbed by the community of its fellows.”
“The blue tape lines are the most “unfastened,” Hiebert continues. “I think of them as being flung out into space to negotiate the unknown. I have spent years sending out this sort of tape line along interior walls of various sites. I use lines to mark out visual footholds for a kind of mental travel—travel that suggests both freedom and belonging in the space. The architecture is fixed, but the mind wanders within it. I think this is how we develop a sense of place. And, the inked lines on paper explore another kind of architecture: the rectangle of a single sheet of paper, and the shape made by the larger ensemble of sheets.”
Hiebert is an artist who is equally at home with the monumental scale of architectural interventions and the intimate scale of drawings on paper; and this spring, an exhibition of her new charcoal and ink drawings, Interventions: New Drawings by Christine Hiebert, will be on view at Victoria Munroe Fine Art, 161 Newbury Street, Boston, from April 15 – May 20, 2010.
Christine Hiebert has created site-specific installations for, among others, the Drawing Center, New York (2003), the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2005), and the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA (2007); and her work has been exhibited throughout the U.S and Europe. Her drawings are in many public and private collections.
www.davismuseum.wellesley.edu
