Making their ‘Mark’ URI showcases the work behind the work BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

The image is dead. Long live the mark!

Well, there was not exactly a coup in the postmodern era whereby representational art was abruptly deposed. But On the Mark, the current show at the University of Rhode Island Main Gallery, demonstrates several styles in which contemporary artists have been confidently trying on the crown for size.

Presented are six artists from around the country and the world who are furthering modern art’s concern that we viewers be aware the artist had a hand in making the work — sometimes with the physical gesture as the sole concern.

They are Heeseop Yoon, from Korea; Miriam Cabessa, from Morocco; Andrew Raftery, from North Carolina; Tom Marioni, from Cincinnati; Susan Knight, from Michigan; and Frances Trombly, from Miami. Except for Marioni, who is based in San Francisco, they currently work on the East Coast. Raftery teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Curator Judith Tolnick Champa has made a point of letting the white walls act like drawing paper for these works — unframed in all but one case. By the 20th century, modernist artists had abandoned the restriction of using lines primarily as edges, to confine objects within outlines. When we are moved by a Matisse figure study, much of what affects us are background areas that if framed by themselves would be abstract paintings.

When the abstract expressionists of mid-century were gaining appreciators, they made marks on canvas their ascetic raison d’être. The squiggly outpourings of Jackson Pollock and the hovering, vaporous monoliths of Mark Rothko were themselves the subjects of the paintings. To stand before these canvases was to be overwhelmed by the process of creating the large works stroke by stroke.

That a process has been captured is most evident in "Junkshop," the masking tape and mylar installation by Heeseop Yoon. Created in a corner near the entrance, thin strips and pieces of black tape climb to the ceiling at one side and spill onto the floor as though slumping from accumulating weight. Upon closer examination, the dense, tumbleweed jumble resolves itself here and there into discrete, mysterious objects. Words pop out, such as a truncated phrase that begins "Do Not Handle Unless." Yoon "drew" it in the gallery from a photograph of a junk shop.

Three of the artists present more clearly representational works. Andrew Raftery does so almost conventionally, using copperplate engravings to depict figures in crowded domestic scenes and, in one case, shopping for suits. But when such engravings were used in 19th-century illustrated magazines, before screened photographs were in use, illustrators tried to make the process invisible, using fine cross-hatched shadings to accurately replicate gradations of tone. Raftery etches widely separated, clearly visible lines; he is in your face about somebody making rather than reporting these images.

Raftery nevertheless captures a wide range of light conditions: framed in doorways, people are clearly brightly lit when we see them simply drawn with hairline strokes; we almost squint. Susan Knight allows herself no such range. She uses the Chinese technique of cutting out lines on white paper, allowing dark paper beneath to show through. Her three pieces here share sea settings, with swirling water and towering pop-up waves. "Sucked Out: The Lamprey Eel and Other Sad Stories" (2002) is aswirl with activity as fish jump (and climb a ladder) and that lamprey faces us threateningly.

Frances Trombly’s "Connections" (2003) depicts an object, but in such a way as not only to transform it but to make the material itself more significant than what is represented. The artist crocheted three brown and two white electrical extensions that look realistic from a distance as they sprawl sinuously across the floor and, at one presentational point, onto a white cube.

Some of the works here are interesting only in filling out the concept of the show. Trombly’s "Streaming" (2005) is simply twisted colored felt ribbons high along one wall like bunting. Festive but trivial. Also fully accomplished in the concept, deflating the actuality, is Tom Moroni’s "Process Prints" (1970). They are 16 lithographed sheets with increasingly denser ink accumulation, from a series of more than 100 that presumably grows even darker. However, his "Drawing a Line As Far As I Can Reach" (1998) has a graceful sweep to it, composed of countless strokes with colored pencils. It’s the definitive gestural inclusion in the show, despite being an elementary art class exercise.

As a painter friend pointed out to me, time was when an artist drew a line from skill, but nowadays they do so from will. On the Mark presents a wide selection of both.