Among the images that compose Barbara Lounder’s Daybook, currently on view at Hermes, only one has a title of its own. With T. H., to the Stone Table is one of the few observational drawings in the exhibition: a drawing of a table with benches next to a tree set against a blank paperwhite back-drop. A bush or plant of some kind juts out sideways from the edge of the table; black egg-like spheres are piled under the bench nearest the viewer. Electric-arc lines tangle amongst the tree branches before discharging out from the tree’s branches to nearby objects and then returning back into the tree, moving back and forth like a restless mind. 
Barbara Lounder
This wandering line persists throughout the other works. Maps of Germany have been cut up to re-veal the bare lines of roads, underscoring a frantic sort of meandering network. The roads, separat-ed from their surroundings, appear like organic network structures: roots, nerves, waterways. Some drawings resemble the structure of the map but have no visible referent. A chaotic mass of red lines, intersected with dots and triangles but no legend to decode it by. Straight lines, breaking, branching, spreading out. No names or places, only lines.
Some of the Daybook images can be categorized as mind-maps. Surreal abstract collages, they create a dreamlike field of apparently disconnected imagery: architecture, animals, cut-out words. But, in the way of the dreams, they feel connected. The mind wanders. The wandering line is anal-ogous to the body of work. The tension between chaos and order, and our attempt to reconcile the overwhelming and unknowable, is an endlessly mappable terrain.
Hermes: http://www.hermeshfx.com/currentupcoming/
Barbara Lounder: Daybook continues until March 1.
Daniel Higham works in a butcher shop where he’ll talk to you about art, food, and life. He writes for Visual Arts News, is Akimblog’s Halifax correspondent, and can be followed on Twitter @HighamDaniel.
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Barbara Lounder at Hermes
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