Justin Gainan
Justin Gainan’s recent labor-intensive graphite drawings emit a quiet heat. They are a product of millions of tiny marks, laid down one by one, each subtly informing the next like bodies pressing up against one another in a crowd. These “fields” of gray are documents of energy expended over time, focused physical activity enacted on a flat surface within finite borders. Suggesting maps of the world, oceans, cities, populations, Gainan’s drawings elevate simple gestures through repeating them ad infinitum, revealing in the process the inevitability and essentialness of variation as a fundamental condition of life. Gainan’s drawings are products of intentionality, as well as vehicles for getting out of the body and tapping into a different state of being—meditative exercises with spiritual dimensions.
Gainan has enacted these drawings in three dimensions as well, perhaps most memorably in a voluptuous installation of hundreds of pieces of scrap lumber, again an accumulation of like but varied forms, stacked and compressed into a finite architectural niche as part of the 2004 BFA exhibition at the H&R Block Artspace at Kansas City Art Institute. It may come as little surprise to learn that Gainan graduated from the school’s fiber department; at its core, his work feels perfectly located in the physical gesture of pulling a stitch—tying a knot, penetrating cloth, traversing distance, repeating …
Since graduating, this young artist has pursued several related but distinct series of drawings. He creates his Dot Portraiture drawings in a distracted state, not deliberately attending to where the pencil might be hitting the paper. Like automatic writing, this looser structure allows for randomness to reveal its own kind of order, as a set of constraints play out in infinite variation. An ongoing series of Smudge Drawings is based on tiny found bits of paper collected from the Dolphin frame shop where Gainan works—literally collections of smudge marks that are byproducts of the framing process. In painstakingly creating enlarged versions of these castoffs, the artist elevates happenstance to what appear as otherworldly landscapes, or at least extremely attentive odes to the color gray, which he admits he likes quite a lot. Pin marks are creeping back into the work, as well, in dialogue with the pencil mark, as Gainan reengages his training in fiber to further expand the physical and expressive terrain of his drawings. Recognized at this early stage in his career with a Charlotte Street Award, Gainan has already asserted himself a serious, thoughtful, and focused artist using the humblest of means and a lightness of touch to create contemplative works with enduring resonance.
—Kate Hackman
