Amanuensis - Elizabeth Hoak-Doering

The Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art is pleased to present artist Elizabeth Hoak Doering’s exhibition amanuensis. With a refined sensitivity to material objects in the context of human use, Elizabeth Hoak Doering questions and suggests possibilities as to the way things mark the passage of time and become actors in the compilation and composition of history. For the drawings shown in amanuensis, objects that are at least thirty years old were collected from both sides of the divided city of Nicosia, fitted with prosthetic drawing styluses, and suspended in order to create drawings on palettes set out on the ground. This took place as an installation exhibited at the colonial-era powerhouse of Nicosia (the Nicosia Municipal Art Center) in the summer of 2009, and the drawings on exhibit at PCCA resulted from the circulation of viewers, motion detectors, analog electronics, and appropriated motors.

Elizabeth Hoak Doering sets up a haunting scenario in which the interior world of things is revealed, upending the usual subject-object relationship that people have with objects around them. Drawings and soundscape presented at the PCCA seem to imply that objects can express themselves; exposing their efforts, and a plurality of [self-] expression. There is the suggestion that the agency traditionally attributed to the artist, in art-making, may be found elsewhere: that the apparatus of drawing per se need not necessarily include the artist’s hand or intellectual, physical agency.

Over the last five years Elizabeth Hoak Doering’s work has focused on low-tech kinetic and site-specific, sometimes ephemeral installations that result in drawings. She explores drawing as a way to unfold the interiority of the external world, including things, and also the natural environment and the electromagnetic fields therein. Her work comes from a tradition of kinetic drawing, recognizing Jean Tinguely and Rebecca Horn, but she consistently and resolutely interferes with the mechanical, preferring to provoke animation, to find and enable gestures already present in the external world.