Craig Dongoski, Attack/Decay/Sustain/Release, 2010, oil pencil and air brush on birch panel, 48 x 48 inches. Image courtesy Whitespace.
Although it isn’t obvious at first glance, Craig Dongoski‘s body of work, Attack/Decay/Sustain/Release, currently on view at Whitespace through Saturday, April 16, 2011, visualizes the connections between signatures and sounds. In handwriting, signatures can speak volumes about their author; in music, sound can be interpreted, but it requires practice. The listener must tune into the frequency, the volume, at which the information is being broadcast. This is where Dongoski’s work begins.
Nearly ten years ago, Dongoski had a habit of turning on his audio recorder every day at three o’clock for three minutes. No matter what the setting, no matter what the activity, Dongoski recorded the ambient sounds in his environment at that moment. As it happened, one day he was teaching a drawing class when he recorded the sounds of pencils scratching across each student’s desk. This was a critical moment. Later, he experimented by placing a contact mic onto a drawing surface, recording the sound of his marks. Perhaps as an offshoot of his interest in calligraphy, he would also begin recording the sound of his signature.
Craig Dongoski's performance at Whitespace involved musical reinterpretations of his drawings, including this one he translated into an original musical score. Above: Craig Dongoski, { }, 2011, color pencil on wood panel, 48 x 48 inches. Image courtesy Whitespace.
Habits are activities that organize our lives. For example, I make coffee every morning, first thing — the habit provides order and somehow helps me feel like I’m in control of how the day goes. Even my dog has a ritual: checking both the front and back doors each morning for reasons not entirely clear. Rituals enable us to inhabit a place and orient ourselves to the world.
This expansive quality of habit-making, how it establishes a tempo or rhythm of life, is what Craig Dongoski’s work encourages us to appreciate. The meaning of “tempo” doubles in Dongoski’s drawings, beginning with a single line that repeats, builds into movements, and mutates into novel forms. Though subtle at first, the difference amplifies as the lines repeat — to the extent that the drawings suggest an entire worldview, affirming that everything returns, but is never the same.
Dongoski’s etchings have such exquisite detail and depth that it’s baffling how they were accomplished. Durations 2 suggests a sea anemone waving on coral while ant-like shapes march across its monochromatic landscape. Staring at the field of markings feels like you’re peering into a vast canyon, into the sedimentary lines of time itself.
Notions of time also appear in the two photographs on display: Frozen Wisdom I and Frozen Wisdom II. The photos depict massive icicle formations that, calling to mind the common phrase “frozen in time,” are easy to dismiss with a surface interpretation. But as with the sedimentary layers of rock, the layers of ice crystals are the visualization of continual movement over time. Nothing is completely frozen; everything is in movement and flux.
Summer Static exists on paper in a burst of color pencil lines. But the lines present themselves in visual contrast to negative space; translated from sound, the gaps emphasize the effect and necessity of pauses in time. In poetry, these are called caesura. Although caesurae exist in written poems to provide moments of rest for the reader, they were originally a device for reciting poems aloud.
According to theories of Holotropic Breathwork, this act of rhythmic breathing can induce hallucinations in the speaker if the correct meter is applied. Dongoski’s work inspires such broad interpretations because of his similarly far-reaching interests. During our recent interview, he mentioned the work of Terrence McKenna, and his artist statement for the show references Konstantīns Raudive, an early researcher of parapsychology.
Craig Dongoski, Sustain, 2011, color pencil on paper, 22 x 30 inches. Image courtesy Whitespace.
Craig Dongoski, Durations: Spring, 2009, oil pencil on birch panel, 63 x 48 inches. Image courtesy Whitespace.
Hallucinatory effects are present throughout Dongoski’s work, especially in his series of oil pencils on birch. Orbital Lullaby II, a fantastic drawing, is a sumptuous study of Victorian lace doilies rendered in satisfying black with cerulean and orange-pink. Another example, Durations: Spring, presents an ornate, almost Maori-tattooing effect in the bottom register of the birch plane. In the top third of the composition, a faint pink outline marks a natural hole in the drawing patterns, interrupted by a nearly invisible medullary ray — a line that grows vertically inside a tree and perpendicular to its horizontal growth rings. This gap not only highlights the subtle grain in the wood, but also resonates with the viewer’s awareness of the slow tempo of organic growth. Heidegger characterized contemporary life as unwilling to tolerate the unseen expansion of organic matter, and so we apply technology to overcome the natural world. My favorite of Dongoski’s birch drawings, Summer Sequence, shows a sustained use of red, orange-pink, black, and blue that, for me, culminate in an almost gnostic awareness that there is a tempo to the cosmos upon which we all draw our lives.
The exhibition also includes a video, Paiva River: I. Orbit Contour, that brings all the show’s elements together. A camera is lowered over the side of a bridge spanning a Portuguese river, equipped with some sort of microphone and an apparatus that allows it to descend and then to spin. At first the spinning is slow enough that a landscape can be discerned, but as the velocity increases there is a moment of nausea followed by a divine stream of colors flooding the screen. The video ends with the camera in the river, serenely recording the lapping waters and the undulating reflection of the world around it. This moment of lulling resonance reverberates throughout Dongoski’s exhibit.
(Disclosure: Susan Bridges, owner of Whitespace, is a member of this publication’s Board of Directors. In pursuit of featuring work that contributes to important cultural discourse, as well as our commitment to transparency, our policy is to disclose instead of exclude.)
Craig Dongoski’s exhibition, Attack/Decay/Sustain/Release, continues at Whitespace through Saturday, April 16, 2011.
