As the son of a draftsman, my formative association with drawing was as a means to represent the world and its potential. Anything to be built first had to be worked out on paper. I’ve inherited my father’s reliance on diagrams as an aid to thinking in my own teaching practice, though I’m more likely to map out Descartes’ mind/body problem than design a go-kart. The underlying impetus to express an idea visually is one among a number of threads that winds its way through Out of Line, the Oakville Galleries current (and soon to close!) survey of contemporary drawing practice. 
Saimaiyu Akesuk, Untitled, 2013, coloured pencil drawing
One room in the exhibition is dedicated to process-based drawings that don’t so much represent ideas as work them out. These seemingly clinical works by Ken Nicol, Thérèse Mastroiacovo, Tammi Campbell, and Joshua Schwebel are all also drily humorous, which adds the necessary torque to their absurd endeavors. Elsewhere David Merritt’s contribution is clearly a diagram, but he infuses it with poetry by literally adding language to the work. Around another corner, Jason McLean does the same to cartoonish ends.
From there the exhibition splits between abstraction and representation, though even some of the former – such as Jennifer Rose Sciarrino’s Rhomboid Floor– and actually examples of the latter. Jaime Angelopoulos and Zin Taylor stay pure with lines and shapes, but stretch the definition of drawing with her pastels and his suspended pieces of wood. Straight-up drawings that keep one foot in the realm of illustration give a friendly face to this dauntingly diverse collection, but that’s not to say Howie Tsui’s scenes of self-mutilation are particularly congenial. However, between Margaret Priest’s radical objectivity to Saimaiyu Akesuk’s interpretive distortions, there’s something for everyone.
Oakville Galleries: http://www.oakvillegalleries.com/
Out of Line continues until September 5.
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.
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Out of Line at Oakville Galleries
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