Redraw

Brooklyn Fireproof
03-01-07

Observe a thing and you alter it. Draw a thing and you do a full blown personal odyssey vision quest transmogrifying magic trick on it. And that is just what the seven capable drawers now showing at Brooklyn Fireproof have done to their respective source materials. Ain Cocke has taken a handful of vintage photographs of military men and sensitively crafted them into sweetheart portraits, effectively turning the uniformed toughs into costumed lovers. Molly Springfield does a double-reconstruction on her subject matter: first photocopying the book text she cherishes and then ever so caringly drawing the copies. Her re-works are ancient in their manualness and riveting in their contemporary implications. Yet another gifted penciler in attendance is Haegeen Kim. Her drawings, situated somewhere between Maurice Sendak and Paul Cadmus, are patiently rendered self portraits: she is there in a gorilla family and again standing serenely beside a beaver and a young Picasso. And the show goes on, with more incontrovertible evidence of just how polymorphous and good for us drawing can be.

—