Curated by Susan Metrican

About the 24th Drawing Show: Feelers:

Feelers, the 24th installment of the BCA Drawing Show, features work by 56 artists. In Feelers, curator Susan Metrican considers the possibilities of existing in a two-dimensional reality through drawing’s inherent encounter with flatness.

The exhibition draws its title from Edwin Abbott Abbott’s novel Flatland, a 19th century sci-fi examination of dimensions in which Abbott describes a two-dimensional world occupied by geometric figures. Metrican notes that in this novel, “the squares, octagons, straight lines and so on are all governed by the rules of their flat world, and their behaviors and customs reflect their limited reality as they can comprehend it. In Flatland, to be a ‘feeler’ is to determine one’s surroundings by reaching out to touch it with appendages.”

It is this kind of touching, testing and searching that unites the work in the exhibition. Feelers brings together a group of artists, works and practices that feature artists’ sensitivity to materials, subject matter and the ability to use feelers to explore through practice and ideas.  Using the principles of drawing as its ground, the show opens up to gestures of flatness, line, touch and emotion. In Feelers, the work considers the line that is drawn between the experience of the three-dimensional world or the multi-dimensional interior world to a separate and exterior surface.

Exhibition curator Susan Metrican is an artist whose work includes painting, sculpture, and video. She is a co-founder of kijidome, an experimental collaborative and project space in Boston, which is a recipient of the 2015 James and Audrey Foster Prize awarded by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. In 2014, Metrican had solo exhibitions at Boston University and Proof Gallery and was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 2013, she was the sübSamsøn artist-in-residence at Samson Projects. Metrican has been featured in group and solo exhibitions in New York, DC, Vermont, Chicago and holds a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and a MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She currently lives and works in Boston, MA.

Artists:

Jennifer Amadeo-Holl, Erika Baglyas, Diana Behl, David Bligh, Dan Boardman, Adina Bricklin, Luke Buffenmyer, Theodore Cantrell, Kate Castelli, Xinyi Cheng, Brian Cirmo, Heather Clark, Barbara E. Cohen, Corey Corcoran, Ruth Daniels, Ian Deleón, Samantha Fields, Rachel Frank, Ariel Freiberg, Gabriela Gamboa, Brian Christopher Glaser, Carly Glovinski, Zachary Herrmann, Nona Hershey, Erika Hess, Kolbeinn Hugi, Vanessa Irzyk, Heather Kapplow, Heidi Lau, Sarah Lubin, Julie Martini, Timothy McCool, Valle Medina, Andrew Mowbray, Nancy Murphy Spicer, Jenene Nagy, Rebecca Newhouse, Liz Nofziger, Marcus Payzant, Diana Jean Puglisi, Carol Radsprecher, Benjamin Reynolds, Ellen Rich, Jennifer Schmidt, Lenny Schnier, Mark Schoening, Gary Setzer, Jim Shrosbree, Garric Simonsen, Jill Slosburg-Ackerman, Eric Stefanski, Willie Stewart, Alain Urrutia, Matthew Whitney, Fanny Wickström, and Maxine Yalovitz-Blankenship.