John Marshall: Drawing on Sculpture

From April 2 — May 2, Rootoftwo — a collaborative partnership between Assistant Professor John Marshall and Cezanne Charles — participate in ​“Drawing on Sculpture”, at Haggerty Art Gallery, University of Dallas. 

Over a dozen artists exhibit a diversity of drawing techniques and practices from sketchbooks to digital renderings. The attached image is an exploded drawing of ​‘Torvald’ from the work ​‘Et Dukkehjem’. The starting point of this work was a re-reading of Henrik Ibsen’s play ​“A Doll’s House” (1879) to explore user-object relationships. ​‘Torvald’ was realized in birch plywood with a micro-controller, sensors, speakers and audio. There is a photocell embedded in the seat of ​‘Torvald’. This sends a message when it registers darkness (i.e. when someone sits down). This triggers a randomly selected line of dialogue from the play to be played as audio. For example: ​“This time I needn’t sit here and be dull all alone. You have just come at a fortunate moment” or ​“How unreasonable and how ungrateful you are. What sort of madness is this! Can you not understand your place in your own home?”