Tango Conway

 Curated by Marcus Dyer-Harrison, ‘fell out of a velvet couch’ saw the company of works by artists who work with collage in the expanded field. Exhibited at Schmick Contemporary in April, 2024 with Samuel Hodge, Amelia Skelton, Rosemary Lee, Marcus Dyer-Harrison, Chris Burton, Tango Conway, Emily Galicek & Madeline Castelli.

Accompanying the drawing, Conway contributed a piece of writing that described her interpretations of sight and collage that you can read below.

Drawing as Collage

As I write this I’m sitting in Doha international airport on a stopover between Sydney to Barcelona. My eyes are weary and raw from the unique combination of two Valium, 14 hours of recycled air, screen fatigue and disrupted sleep. Needless to say, I’m acutely aware of how inadequate my eyes are to be staring at my computer let alone to be conjuring a connection with my brain in order to write about sight itself.

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When you look out the window of a moving train, car or plane for that matter, your eyes flick back and forth, left to right, right to left and again until you look away. As you do this your brain pieces together a landscape made from a quick succession of flitting snapshots.

Of course, your brain is always unconsciously sifting through the never ending stream of visual data it sees day-in-day-out. From the banal to the spectacular, the cinematic to tacky or the unfamiliar and gruesome we see a wide range of visual material yet unless we are drawing it we don’t realise how much we are actually seeing. 

When you draw an image you are consciously digesting this data flow. The existence of your subject gets scattered across the floor of your mind before it whips back into focus both in the blink of an eye and also over the sustained length of the drawing. At least, this is how I feel when I draw. Absorbing the excruciating detail in order to define form, proportion, composition and tone.

Like a collage, drawing combines these fundamental elements together and tessellates them on the picture plane via a series of marks. Mark-making, in this sense, is a summary of the visual spectrum you see structured by the way in which your brain chooses to assemble it. Drawing allows you to find the frequency where your mind is in tune with what you’re seeing and encourages you to construct it all into one image.

It is amazing though, that no matter how much you’re seeing and despite the layers and layers of observation and mark-making you can still miss important details such as fingers, entire faces or even the genitals of a figure. Sight has a funny way of seeing nothing too.

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