Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

The First Writing, a Drawing Invitational Exhibition

Rock Creek Helzer Gallery

• Exhibition on view: October 8?¨C November 1, 2018
• Opening reception: Wednesday, October 31, from 12-1pm

The Helzer Gallery at Portland Community College¡¯s Rock Creek campus is pleased to present The First Writing. This show is a comprehensive exhibition of drawings curated by PCC Art Instructor Mark Andres.

The statement by Marjane Satrapi, ¡°The first writing by the human being was drawing,¡± inspired Curator Mark Andres to conceive of The First Writing exhibition. It was Andres¡¯ intention to bring together a diverse group of artists for whom ¡°drawing remains a primal means of communication: one parallel to written language, but a preverbal one which ties these artists to the ancestral caves and to the mysteries of looking before the world was named.¡±

The artists invited to show their work in The First Writing are a range of local artists, Portland Community College instructors, and artists from throughout the world. They are united by a ¡°common love of drawing,¡± and ¡°share common desire to communicate not with words, numbers, bits or photos, but with objects made directly by human hands,¡± according to Andres.

Participating artists include

I hope the range of the exhibition, which includes depiction, invention, diagram, abstraction, materiality, and narrative, offers the viewer a sense of the diversity of perceptual and conceptual tools at the heart of what we identify as drawing. Andres