The people who run Zolla-Lieberman Gallery got rather nervous, Brian Sikes says, when he started talking about making drawings even bigger than those in his current show.
It’s not hard to see why. At least one of his works on paper already would overwhelm average walls in most homes. One suspects that Sikes aims, finally, to make a two-dimensional representation of an entire quasi-futuristic architectural structure-life-size.
He calls them drawings of architecture that is “overdetermined”-visionary, fantastical, equally a product of pure imagination and practicality. They are also literally bare-bones drawings.
“All the things I draw make reference to elements in architecture that provide support or reinforcement to the structure: buttresses of masonry or concrete that take lateral loads and transfer them to the ground; piers that are like columns; footings that are poured and transfer vertical loads to horizontal.
“Ever since I was young I’ve worked in construction,” Sikes says. All the forms that I utilize or conjure are based on actual construction-they may be far more elaborate than they have to be, but I do think of them as being structures that could be built.”
He has no architectural or mechanical drafting training, and these drawings thus occupy some kind of intermediate zone between art and architecture, between the representation of possible forms and abstraction. Those tensions are amplified by the way the forms are layered, shifted and replicated, like some weird sprouting geometry.
Up close, something maniacal and obsessive suffuses the welter of lines and shapes, atop a pleasingly tactile ground that barely suggests landscape, while from across the room they become still and assume a more solid countenance.
Sikes says that shift of perception is quite intentional and represents one way his work has changed over the last couple of years. “I was thinking a lot about the centennial of the Columbian Exposition, and I wanted the work to be more clearly about architecture.
“These pieces have a lot more complexity of structure. That’s all part of forcing people to slow down in their reading of the image. I’m distressing the structure by complicating it, by reproducing and fragmenting it, in order for it to keep yielding more information.”
The exhibition continues through March 20 at 325 W. Huron St.
