THROUGH December 8, 2012


Media Contact:
Sandra Q. Firmin
Curator, UB Art Galleries
716.645.0570
sfirmin@buffalo.edu

More images are available on request

UB Art Gallery, Center for the Arts (north campus) presents
Falling Through Space Drawn by the Line

Opening Public Reception:
Thursday, September 20, 6-8 pm

The exhibition will take place in UB Art Gallery, Center for the Arts, 
North Campus. It is free and open to the public, and will be on view 
from September 20 through December 8, 2012.

Falling Through Space Drawn by the Line lures us into imagined 
landscapes, through fields of abstraction, and into recollections and 
observations of lived experiences. The artists in this exhibition work 
on paper and employ drawing as their primary mode of expression to 
pictorialize internal visions and grapple with the external world around 
them. Up until the twentieth century, drawing was generally considered 
subservient to painting, sculpture, and architecture by providing 
preparatory sketches to communicate and fine-tune ideas and forms. 
“While drawing’s status has been elevated in recent years,” notes 
exhibition curators Sandra Q. Firmin (curator, UB Art Galleries) and 
Joan Linder (professor, UB Department of Visual Studies), “it is still 
regarded for the ease and immediacy in which thoughts, perceptions, and 
emotions can be visualized using widely available materials such as ink 
and graphite.”

As an embodied practice, drawing provides an antidote to the 
preponderance of digital gadgetry and media images that have infiltrated 
all aspects of society. Just as “Do-It-Yourself” culture and urban 
farming movements celebrate the handmade and physically connect us to 
the modes of production that sustain us are gaining in popularity. Even 
Marsha Cottrell, who uses a computer program to map out her invented 
cosmos, perceives the mouse as a pencil-like tool and carefully pieces 
together individual sheets of paper as if she was assembling a quilt or 
large-scale mosaic. Allyson Strafella, Lori Ellison, Tony Orrico, and 
Stan Shellabarger stress the temporal dimension of drawing through 
sustained repetitive marks that record and measure their corporeal 
presence. Through the unassuming gestures of walking, tiny pen strokes, 
sweeping graphite arcs, and typing on a custom built manual typewriter, 
these artists invite the viewer to relate to their process and perhaps 
enter a meditative state in which the fragility and simple beauty of 
existence and creation can be contemplated.

Drawing carries the history of its own making. Unlike painting, which 
can easily conceal the marks and different compositional strategies 
employed by the artist, in drawing one can detect the artists hand 
through misplaced lines, erasures, increased pressure on the medium, and 
wobbly lines dynamically getting thicker and thinner. Charmaine Wheatley 
exposes her process and embraces these so called imperfections. She 
records evanescent moments, which generally pass unnoticed, in 
watercolor, fine tipped pens, and unconventional on-hand materials, for 
instance, glittery nail polish or a thin wash of fruit juice or soup. 
George Boorujy, David Dupuis, Edie Fake, Ellen Lesperance, and Toyin 
Odutola also mine their surroundings for content as they seduce the 
viewer through bold lines, vivid color, and dazzling pattern into 
considering socio-political topics such as queer and racial identities, 
feminist history, and human animal relationships.

Drawers tend to have an intensely intimate rapport between their mediums 
and the surface on which they record their presence. Drawing possesses a 
magical capacity to conjure worlds and convey stories, as cave dwellers 
realized 12,000 years ago and children intuitively know when they swirl 
together galaxies of color and begin to translate their scrawls into 
representations of people, places, and things. I connects us to this 
fundamental human activity of mark making and presents captivating 
universes parallel to our own. It also shows how marks on a page or even 
one’s own passage through space—in which visible and invisible traces 
record one’s movement onto the material world—can constitute drawing.	

Participating artists: Reed Anderson, George Boorujy, Saul Chernick, 
Marsha Cottrell, David Dupuis, Lori Ellison, Edie Fake, Rosemarie Fiore, 
Ellen Lesperance, Schuyler Maehl, Anne Muntges, Toyin Odutola, Michelle 
Oosterbaan, Tony Orrico, Charles Ritchie, Stan Shellabarger, Molly 
Springfield, Allyson Strafella, Charmaine Wheatley, Ripley Whiteside, 
and Deborah Zlotsky.

Work by Charmaine Wheatley funding by the Canadian Council.

Generous support for the exhibition is provided by Shoshana and Wayne 
Blank. Additional support provided by UB’s Department of Visual Studies.

UB Art Gallery, Center for the Arts, is funded by the UB College of Arts 
Sciences, the Visual Arts Building Fund, and the Seymour H. Knox 
Foundation Fine Arts Fund.

UB Art Gallery is located in the Center for the Arts on the North Campus 
just north of the I-290 on Millersport Highway. Traveling east or west 
on the I-290 take exit 5B to Millersport Highway North. Turn onto the 
campus at the Coventry entrance. As you enter the campus, the Center for 
the Arts is a high gabled white building directly ahead of you.

After 3 PM and on weekends, parking is free and a permit is not 
required. During all other times, guests must park in metered spaces, 
visitor parking lots, or obtain a parking permit from UB Art Gallery 
staff. In order to obtain a parking permit, temporarily park in the 
circle in front of the Center for the Arts and see a gallery attendant 
inside.

Public Programs:

Wednesday, October 3, 4 to 7pm
Tony Orrico performs the Penwald Drawing, 8 Circles, in the Lightwell 
Gallery. Penwald Drawings are a series of bilateral drawings in which 
Orrico explores the use of his body as a tool of measurement to inscribe 
geometries through movement.

Friday, October 26, 4 to 8pm
Big Draw as part of Center for the Arts Open Studios
An extravaganza of drawing activities will occur throughout the Center 
for the Arts at the same time as a showcase of work by students in the 
Departments of Media Study, Music, Theater and Dance, and Visual Studies.

Wednesday, November 7, 4 to 7pm
"Print, Stamp and Draw” Workshop and Exhibition Tour for adults and 
Educators with Anne Muntges.
Participants will print with unconventional materials to create Holiday 
cards.
*Fee: $20 per person; art materials included.
*To register for workshops, please contact education curator Ginny 
O’Brien at 839-3754 or visit www.ubartgalleries.org.

Exhibition discussion and tour session content supports NYS and Common 
Core Learning Standards; certificate of completion provided.

Saturday, November 10, 1 to 3 pm
“Print, Stamp, and Draw” Workshop and Exhibition Tour for Families with 
Anne Muntges
Participants will print with unconventional materials to create Holiday 
cards.
*Fee: $10 per person; art materials Included.
To register for workshops, please contact education curator Ginny 
O’Brien at 839-3754 or visit www.ubartgalleries.org.

Tuesday, November 13, 12 to 1pm
Curators’ tour of the exhibition.

Monday, November 26, 6:30 to 8:00pm
“Michelle Oosterbaan: Both – and Once Again”
Michelle Oosterbaan will lecture about her work as part of the 
Department of Visual Studies Speaker Series in the Center for the Arts 
Screening Room. Oosterbaan is a painter whose artistic output 
investigates the psychology of space and color. She is intrigued with 
how events in our lives transform us, whether they are personally 
visceral and/or vicarious. Oosterbaan’s artwork has been exhibited 
nationally and internationally at venues that include The Drawing 
Center, The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, and The Pennsylvania 
Academy of the Fine Arts.