Hand / Forever Forever
Plaster, Ink, Plywood
2022

Brent R. Garbowski

In my drawings I use text and images as signifiers of hope and longing. Parts of the drawings are then cut out generating negative spaces or void spaces that lack visual information. These works mine the sentimental iconography of hope and invert it into the abyss. The process of making a drawing is a process of hoping. When we place the pen to the paper we hope that this drawing is going to be a good one. Professionally, we might even hope that the drawing can become something more, that it can be built into our livelihood. This hope is also mirrored in the process of seeking an MFA. It's a kind of religion, a belief in a better tomorrow. You can't win if you don't play. Scratching away the foil of a scratch card is a form of mark making in which we are in pursuit of that hope. As we scratch the card we become unconscious of the marks that we are making. Our hands moving over the card leaving behind a drawing, a shape made not by our eyes but our hope. So too as we cast a seed head to the wind. So too as a school girl might abandon her self consciousness for a moment and write a lover's name on the window of a car, a doodle in a history notebook, a name redacted, not a winner. The drawings are drawings of drawings. As I troll through bars and scratch cards strangers, the marks in the foil become tea leaves, a drawing of unbridled hope. Like school girls, the cruel optimism holds us for an instant, then we snap back to our drinks, bound in a moment in which we dared to hope.