glossa re

glossa re

Clay Dunklin’s work consistently pushes the border of what is expected in drawing. While one will find pencil and charcoal on paper among his work, the majority of his work exists as drawing in a different way. Dunklin’s work is a performative drawing, a kind of mark making that tests the arbitrary categorical boundaries of art. Where does drawing stop and painting, video, or performance begin? Can the body’s motion be the tools to draw? Dunklin’s video glossa re and the resultant drawings, called Hatchings attest to the arbitrariness of the borders between categories of art, and perform this breaking free from the strictures of drawing by breaking through the paper slowly and repetitively with his tongue. The body becomes the pencil, and the motion of that body the act of drawing. Dunklin’s work is ever in pursuit of an expansion (or perhaps an erasure) of the definition of drawing.

- Megan Rook-Koepsel, Curator, Performing the Border, The American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center