Terminal City art review, printed exactly as I submitted it. Go check this show out if you're in town; the best works in the exhibition are, unfortunately, almost impossible to reproduce in print or on the web, and demand to be seen in person.

Kim Kennedy Austin
K Structure
State Gallery, upper floor, 1564 West 6th Avenue
Through 23 April 2005

Reviewed by Christopher Brayshaw


Kim Kennedy Austin makes elegant ink and watercolor drawings of linguistic and architectural systems. This sounds like a mouthful, evoking the dated specter of "linguistic conceptual art," with its endless boring Xeroxes and photostats of dictionary definitions, institutional grey card files and ring binders full of useless information, but Austin's work impresses with its formal variety and the conceptual rigor she brings to her mappings of social and architectural space.

Austin's first solo exhibition at State, draws upon a historical text documenting the rebuilding of the Quebec Bridge across the St. Lawrence River in 1907, following the collapse of an older structure. Some drawings detail the destruction of the old bridge, some are based upon engineering diagrams and schematics for the replacement span, and some – to my eyes, the best – sketch the social structures that brought both bridges into being.

Austin's most conventional drawings reproduce, with her trademark skinny black ink lines, old architectural renderings or engineering diagrams. These scientific and technical sources are abstractions of real things in the world: rivets; steel girders; sheet metal and decking. They enable anyone skilled enough to read them to conjure up a synthesis of their parts, to spin a bridge or building from a stack of raw materials as easily as spiders spin their webs from thin air.

Austin's drawings call her sources' conceptual transparence into question. Lines tremble or veer off at odd angles, and ostensibly stable structures take on the appearance of a house of cards, ready to shiver to pieces.

In drawings like, "Details of Cassion, Section B-B," and, "Details of Cassion, Section A-A," technical details pile up on top of each other like geological strata. These images resemble road cuts, exhuming layer upon layer of buried meaning from their architectural sources. These pictures are essentially contour drawings that treat their source images as just another kind of information, no different from more traditional pictorial subjects like flowers, fruit, or faces (In this, they share important conceptual parallels with Ben Reeves' contour drawings of paintings, recently exhibited at the Equinox Gallery).

A second, and to my mind much less successful style of drawing depicts the faltering and eventually collapsed structure of the old bridge as white negative space against a brightly colored background of pinkish-red watercolor wash. These images' veer too far toward tastefulness; Austin's choice of color and her application of it seem entirely arbitrary, designed to create aesthetically pleasing compositions and not to articulate some hidden element of a source drawing or photograph. "Photograph Showing the Suspended Span Falling…" is the best of these, with its jumbled heap of girders arranged like Pick-Up sticks, and its watercolor halo plunging toward the river below.

A third kind of drawing eschews representation all together, and simply consists of texts and names. "Transactions of Book Cover" treats Austin's source text as just another object up for depiction, and its witty grace results from Austin's labored, hand-drawn recreation of its source image's mechanically set and printed typefaces.

The two best works in the exhibition, "Organization of St. Lawrence Bridge Co., Ltd.," and, "Bibliography, pp.304-310," map the hierarchical organization of the private company that built the new bridge, and engineering details associated with its construction. By dispersing thousands of words in space like a cloud of soot or snowflakes, Austin's precise hand lettering focuses attention on specific dates, names and organizational systems in ways that a mechanical typeface never could. Her conceptually and formally precise drawings are obviously informed by 60s-era conceptualism, but they do not reprise older strategies of analysis and display so much as they extend them into the present. Austin's images' concision is a source of real conceptual strength, and of a strange quiet beauty, too.
- posted by cjb @ 9:09 AM