The first exhibition of drawings that I organized was in 1985. I was 17. The show was primarily my drawings and a whole bunch of album sleeves, and posters I was collecting of Raymond Pettibon and other Los Angeles music scene artists. The exhibition was in my bedroom and the reception featured music on my turntable by Black Flag, X and the Minutemen. The crowd was never larger than 3 or 4. We dug it. My parents hated it. It was up for over a year, I was searching and it was a map of my life.

Years later, with technology swirling around me on a constant basis with cords and plugs and the hum of hard drives, I find myself connected once again to the lure of drawing for its immediacy and associative power. Drawing for me is not so much about a final "work-on-paper" as it is about working through a series of ideas and exploring a concept. I am interested in being able to simultaneously visualize the potential construction and de-construction of each piece. As such, the drawing moves toward the unlimited potential of an object-idea not yet fully realized or materialized, and always on the brink of unfolding.

Drawn Together/Collapse Apart is a group exhibition featuring eight contemporary artists whose work is informed by or makes use of drawing as a means to negotiate complex ideas about how we might figure out the essence of the art object, the space around us, and how we get closer to an idea. In fact, some of these works share in structure concepts I find intriguing about space: The physical and emotional space between people, the fractured space of the landscape, the re-representation of mapped space, and the collision of celluloid and historical space, to name a few.

The individual works selected for this exhibition acknowledge the material of drawing and its democratic nature; everyone has at some point expressed himself of herself through drawing. You can’t be fooled or tricked. You can see exactly what went into it. Each drawing here exists as a personal inventory that searches in the distance while simultaneously collapsing it.

It is my hope that this work, seen as a whole, will establish an exchange of ideas between one another that will not only engage the viewer in a personal way, but also add to the discourse that surrounds the practice of drawing within contemporary art.

-Curtis Stage, Curator