Past
Events
ELIZABETH HOAK DOERING
amanuensis
29 September – 6 November 2009
Images
Biography
The Pharos Centre for Contemporary
Art is pleased to present artist Elizabeth Hoak Doering’s
exhibition amanuensis. With a refined sensitivity to material
objects in the context of human use, Elizabeth Hoak Doering
questions and suggests possibilities as to the way things mark
the passage of time and become actors in the compilation and
composition of history. For the drawings shown in amanuensis,
objects that are at least thirty years old were collected from
both sides of the divided city of Nicosia, fitted with
prosthetic drawing styluses, and suspended in order to create
drawings on palettes set out on the ground. This took place as
an installation exhibited at the colonial-era powerhouse of
Nicosia (the Nicosia Municipal Art Center) in the summer of
2009, and the drawings on exhibit at PCCA resulted from the
circulation of viewers, motion detectors, analog electronics,
and appropriated motors.
Elizabeth Hoak Doering sets up a haunting scenario in which the
interior world of things is revealed, upending the usual
subject-object relationship that people have with objects around
them. Drawings and soundscape presented at the PCCA seem to
imply that objects can express themselves; exposing their
efforts, and a plurality of [self-] expression. There is the
suggestion that the agency traditionally attributed to the
artist, in art-making, may be found elsewhere: that the
apparatus of drawing per se need not necessarily include the
artist’s hand or intellectual, physical agency.
Over the last five years Elizabeth Hoak Doering’s work has
focused on low-tech kinetic and site-specific, sometimes
ephemeral installations that result in drawings. She explores
drawing as a way to unfold the interiority of the external
world, including things, and also the natural environment and
the electromagnetic fields therein. Her work comes from a
tradition of kinetic drawing, recognizing Jean Tinguely and
Rebecca Horn, but she consistently and resolutely interferes
with the mechanical, preferring to provoke animation, to find
and enable gestures already present in the external world.