Line

Juried by Tara Anne Dalbow

About the Juror

Tara Anne Dalbow is a writer and critic currently living in Los Angeles. Her critical work can be found in Art Basel, Artforum, ARTnews, Art Papers, Artsy, Bomb, Flaunt, Frieze, Dwell, Interview, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, W magazine, and elsewhere.

Through Lines by Tara Anne Dalbow 

What is a line? A line, like a rose, is a line is a line. If you look up the word line in any major dictionary, you’ll find pages and pages of entries. Etymologically, it comes from the Latin linea, meaning “linen thread, string, plumb line.” In mathematics, a line is considered a one-dimensional figure that extends infinitely in both directions. In literature, it’s the fundamental unit from which all written languages are derived. Traditionally, in the visual arts, lines are most closely associated with drawing, graphite or ink on paper. The Swiss-German artist Paul Klee once called a line a “dot that went on a walk,” while the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt defined art as a “line around your thoughts.” In our day-to-day lives, we encounter lines everywhere; we use them to describe, contain, connect, and create. 

The selected artworks feature lines that wander, whirl, unravel, break off, lunge and loop, bind and cleave, delineate and obfuscate. They’re abstract and representational, phenomenological and conceptual. These lines are materialized, made of silver leaf, silk, screen mesh, and porcelain. They are woven, painted, pasted, dripped, burned, scribbled, 3D-printed, and inscribed. They drift and undulate like ocean waves and are grounded, sturdy as redwood trees. They are soothing and exciting. They both reach into the past and forward toward the future; they affix time to a grid or expand it outward like a rhizomatic root system. They are textual, political, graphic, geometric, and architectural in nature. They encompass lines of thought, borderlines, horizon lines, and poetic lines.   

The range of submissions highlights the versatility of the line, as well as the inexhaustibility of creative expression. Several of the artists in Through Line use lines to evoke the diversity and interconnectedness of the natural world, drawing inspiration from the irregularity and fluidity of organic forms. They envision lines capable of animating the same vigor and momentum of living beings. Other artists employ the grid as both an organizational tool and a subject of study to explore themes of interdependence—between the present and the past, between surface and space, and between us (here) and them (there). They either adhere to or resist the age-old pattern to advance their medium. Still others plumb the emotional depths of the line, reifying theories about the correlation between certain line qualities and specific feelings. The final group gathers artists who extend the line beyond the two-dimensional plane and frame, into shared space. Using wire, fibers, mesh, and clay, they challenge all manner of convention and classification.  

Many of the works could fit into more than one category, reflecting the dynamic, multifaceted approaches artists are combining to convey something of our contemporary moment. Despite the various groupings, a common thread running throughout the exhibition is an effort to convey the simultaneity and plurality of our globalized society, illuminating the invisible network of intersecting lines of connection.

I.The nature of a line 

Donna Leavitt / Nicole Pieper / Jim Zver / Leora Armstrong / Victoria Zhuk / Casey Engel / Kimberly Callas / Kristin Holcomb / Marianne McGrath / Pamela Drix

“Nature abhors a straight line,” maintained the 18th-century architect William Kent. In contrast to the geometric and the reticular, artists render nature in lines that emphasize not only its curvatures and irregularities but also its ongoingness and multiplicity. Through repetition, radial patterns, and rhizomatic structures, they foreground nature's reach and resilience. 

Donna Leavitt marshals classical drawing techniques—contour lines, linear construction, shading, and hatching—to reproduce the integrity and idiosyncrasies of a singular tree. That its illustrated form exceeds the combined dimensions of the paper tiles suggests both a grandeur and an ineluctable expansibility. Applying a similar generosity of attention on a more intimate scale, Nicole Pieper renders twisted branches and raveled reeds in pen and ink. Jim Zver depicts nature’s prolific propagation in his kaleidoscopic charcoal composition, which is poised between the abstract and figurative, the image and the gesture. Also radial, Leora Armstrong’s burn drawing features a series of concentric circles that resemble tree rings, growing ever outward—and across the center, like the meandering path left by a snail, a shimmering silver line. A similarly sinuous line traces the biomorphic curves of Victoria Zhuk's red clay vessel. Casey Engel dyes linen with natural pigments to convey the terracotta and umber of a rocky ridgeline. 

Kimberly Callas’s archaic torso, 3D-printed in biofilament, is covered in hand-drawn illustrations of marine life, visualizing the indivisibility of the human species from the natural world around them. Nature's reclamation of man-made structures is memorialized in Kristin Holcomb’s photograph of meandering vines spreading across crumbling concrete. Marianne McGrath’s installation includes an abandoned bridge constructed from reclaimed wood, surrounded by hundreds of elegant porcelain reeds that appear to ripple in the breeze. Also capturing the dynamism and density of botanical matter are Pamela Drix’s six ink-on-vellum panels crisscrossed with tangles of tendrils, branches, and boughs. 

II. On and off the gridlines 

Gloria Matuszewski /  Denise Yaghmourian / Carleen Zimbalatti / Zachary Stensen / Karen Rothman / Michael McNeil / Jean Tock / Kim Svoboda / Natasha Das

Many of the submissions utilize grids, perhaps unsurprisingly, considering their prevalence throughout art history and their centrality to 21st-century life—try as you might, there’s no escaping the World Wide Web. The artist’s various engagements with the pattern suggest its nearly limitless potential for reinterpretation and experimentation. 

Gloria Matuszewski’s delicately drawn grid of perfect half-inch squares feels hushed and meditative, a result of the artist’s own methodical devotion to the act of creation. Composed from a process similarly slow and deliberate, Denise Yaghmourian’s color fields are covered in an intricate net of hand-stitched thread that registers as both digital and biological, as equations and prayers. In place of actual string, Carleen Zimbalatti mimics the fine needlecraft of her grandmother’s crocheting with acrylic and ink. The materiality of Zachary Stensen’s illustration also confounds at first glance. Employing the grid and dot system long used to replicate printed matter, he builds images from tiny calligraphic marks that activate the tension between parts and the whole, while blurring the boundaries between virtual and physical processes. Disrupting the precision of the minimalist tradition, Karen Rothman’s vibrant intersecting watercolor lines are loose and gestural.

Michael McNeil and Jean Tock both represent grids they’ve encountered in the world. In McNeil’s mesmerizing oil painting of a building, the rigidity of the structure’s reticular windows is in striking contrast to the warped reflection captured in the glass. Tock uses wire garden fencing to visualize the border between the United States and Mexico, highlighting how a grid can both connect and separate, unite and divide. Elsewhere, Kim Svoboda's and Natasha Das’s textiles recall how agricultural fields, when viewed from above, resemble patchwork quilts. Svoboda constructs hers from appliqué and digitally printed cotton, while Das crafts hers from silk, incorporating intricate threadwork and subdued colors.

III. Expression lines

Lorraine Rilling / Annie Norbeck / Betsey Hansell / Laura Snyder / Gosha Karpowicz / Suzie Buchholz / Seoryung Park / Tamar Zinn / Virginia Sharkey 

Over the course of the last century, numerous studies have confirmed the correlation between line quality and emotion. Acute angles often relate to intensity and unease, while rounded lines suggest fluidity and harmony. Sharp staccato lines are associated with strength and severity, and long, streaming lines with gentleness and tranquility. While horizon lines provide stability and balance, vertical lines conjure a sense of aspiration and formality. Throughout the exhibition, artists mediate line quality, along with color and texture, to convey movement, energy, and emotion, bridging the interpretive distance between the work and the viewer. 

Lorraine Rilling captures the feeling of grace and equanimity one can experience standing before the sea with undulating silver lines and amorphous shapes in shades of aquamarine, teal, and cerulean. Also using horizontal lines to convey rippling waves or perhaps rolling hills, Annie Norbeck’s layered oil paintings image landscapes viewed through the befogging lens of memory. Betsey Hansell’s photograph of a shimmering lattice of light at the bottom of a pool preserves the entrancing effects of water. Similarly, the serpentine moiré pattern in Laura Snyder’s intricate watercolor and graphite depiction of ocean currents generates an illusionistic rippling movement that's first calming, then, as you struggle to look away, disconcerting. Gosha Karpowicz’s luminous composition portrays water dripping rather than flowing, with white and lilac pigments streaming down the linen canvas in tremulous rivulets, much like rain on a windowpane and similarly melancholic.  

Picturing the frenzy of contemporary life rife with ecstasies and agonies, harmony and dissonance, consistency and chaos, is Suzie Buchholz in her off-kilter oil paintings full of thick, smeary brushstrokes, Twombly-esque scrawl, and energetic dashes. The frantically scribbled lines in Seoryung Park's collages and Tamar Zinn’s charcoal and oil pastel abstractions express a sense of conflict and ire that, in the former, is compounded by the accompanying acts of erasure in the image, and in the latter, by the scratch marks marring the surface. Virginia Sharkey combines exacting vertical lines with curves and swoops, suggesting the depth and resonance of emotion often associated with classical music.  

IV. Space-Line continuum 

Elisa Wolcott / Marianne McGrath / Robin Mullery / Nancy Ivanhoe / Nicholas Wood / Emily Shepard / Gregory Dzurita / Kimberly English

Many of the artists in the exhibition transcend the flatness of the picture plane by continuing the line into the spatial dimensions of sculpture and architecture. By physicalizing the line, they reimagine what a line is, where it can go, and what it can do. Elisa Wolcott, for example, iteratively recreates both drawn lines and paper planes in clay. In Two Strands Are Easily Broken, 2023, two stoneware ribbons demarcate the right angle where the wall meets the ceiling, positing the world itself as the work of art. In First Draft, Final Letter, 2022, she reproduces a letter from her grandfather in porcelain, the loopy script barely legible on the glossy surface, mimicking the gradual fading of memory over time. Combining ideas from Wolcott’s two sculptures is Marianne McGrath’s porcelain curtain, composed of ten strands of tiles, each adorned with stream-of-consciousness-style writing, that renders lines of thought visible. 

Robin Mullery also visualizes language, though in a less linear fashion; her swirling, nebulous wire sculpture contains lines of poetry written across a smattering of hanging tags. Suggesting a similarly elegant pirouetting motion, Nancy Ivanhoe’s mesh cylinders conflate interior and exterior, negative and positive, visible and invisible. Nicholas Wood also utilizes negative space in his glazed terracotta constructions that affect the frontal, pictorial quality of drawing, but with the materiality of sculpture. 

Rather than abandoning the picture plane altogether, some artists build off it, as seen in the work of Emily Shepard, whose collages, composed of layers of cut paper and paint, include diagonal threads that escape the constraints of the flat surface. Gregory Dzurita envisions his contemplative architectural paintings on asymmetrical, augmented canvases, which lend them a striking sculptural dimensionality—the eye struggles to distinguish between real and illusory depth. Enframing one of her woven textiles, Net Study, 2024, Kimberly English also challenges the integrity of the two-dimensional surface. She expands beyond a single plane in a second work Will Versus Weight, 2024, where each of six connected panels features progressively thicker thread: the first is tightly woven blurring the fine blue and white thread into a slate grey, while in the last the blue is hardly discernible beneath a layer of heavy, draped white ropes. The contrast facilitates a consideration of the complexities of interdependence.