The Goldmark Cultural Center is proud to present Drawn Out, a solo pop-up exhibition that is on display in the Goldmark Artists’ Showcase from 31 January 2022 to 13 February 2022. Consisting of a series of drawings by Goldmark artist Camden Bailey, the works featured in Drawn Out were created through a process of grid drawing and free-associative mark making.

A reception for the exhibition will be held at the Goldmark Artists’ Showcase from 3.00pm - 5.00pm on Sunday, 6 February 2022. Camden Bailey will be present during the reception to speak to visitors about his exhibition and artwork.

Presented are a series of drawings and collages that are made through an automatic process involving the grid and free associative mark making. It involves laying out a rough hand drawn grid, and building up a series of marks into an rhythmic mass of irregular pattern. My goal is to pull emotion and semi-conscious thought into a form that strips them of their external origin, pushing them into a game of visual pseudo-logic. From there they become a sublimation of perceived narratives, histories, and conflicts; a shadowy relief of consciousness against the weight of reality.

This episode of my practice began during severe personal difficulty and development, during which I started playing chess and reading a lot of history. This was I think in pursuit of finding patterns to make sense of a world where recognition is often elusive or misleading. History became integral to broadening my own empathy, building a plot of comparison and analysis that was outside my cave of perception. Chess was the opposite; an idealistic expression of logic and an exercise in the cunning power behind reason. What it came to mean for my work was the introduction of the grid as a field for the automatic drawing to act upon and repeat, and history as a backdrop for the evocation of an internal mythology.

• Camden Bailey, 2022