Keith Walsh, Artist's Statement, Drawings 2000-2002

The 2000-2002 drawings are performances.   I use prismacolor pencils for these bodily-scaled drawings that are painstakingly executed at my standing eye level.  Hence I become extremely aware of my physical movements, vision, issues of control, and time.  The texts are premises that are devised in advance of the drawing, and are more extensive than the drawn texts that appear within the work.  The drawings are executed in a left to right direction, mirroring not only my bodily bias but also the way Western culture reads text, which can direct the viewer to participate likewise.  The premise of the work with its drawn texts and vector compositions are organized by a synthesis of my bodily movements or limits and spatial conceptualizations of my lived experience in Los Angeles and beyond. The scale and type of content ranges from ephemeral audio stimulus to the imagined relocation of urban construction barriers, the reenactment of another artist’s performance, to the sensed political migration of a nation. In contrast to the empirical function of the drawn texts and the optical presence of the prismacolor vectors, I am interested in how the drawings represent the simultaneous appearance and disappearance of my body, content, and time.