NEW YORK.- From September 16 to October 28 The Drawing Center will present Common Destination: Selections Fall 2006, featuring twelve emerging artists selected from the Viewing Program. The artists in Common Destination explore the fictions, histories, and futures of geopolitics through an expansive approach to drawing. Working in New York, San Francisco, Europe, and Australia, they craft fantastical terrains and architectures from line in space, on paper, and in geography and language. Amidst contemporary centripetal and centrifugal forces that draw and erase borders with ever increasing intensity, their transformations of place share a revitalizing metaphysical and individual perspective. Participating in the exhibition are: Bogdan Achimescu, Tomislav Cerani´c, Vadim Fiskin, Ivan Grubanov, Olalekan Jeyifous, Yuri Leiderman, Heidi Neilson, Nusra Latif Qureshi, Stephen Shanabrook, Dario Solman, Sophie Tottie, and Jina Valentine. The exhibition will run concurrently in the main gallery and the Drawing Room at 40 Wooster.

Bogdan Achimescu (Krakow, Poland), a self-described “Nomad draughtsman and installationist,” works with ideas of cultural identity, societies and habitat. For this exhibition, he will create drawings on transitory structures such as tents or Mongolian “gers” as an extension of his ugly places series, based on political dystopia, mutant gardens, online auctioned junk, graphomania, totalitarian architecture, nomadic solutions, and archaeology. Tomislav Cerani´c (Sibenik, Croatia) crafts finely detailed drawings of fantastical architecture. These imaginary constructions, from the Star City series, levitate in an emptiness, contrasting their dense and intricate composition. Vadim Fiskin (Ljubljana, Slovenia) presents unexpected perspectives through his geo-graphic drawings and a video projection of the software program he formulated that tracks lines of latitude to capture the image of a never setting sun. Ivan Grubanov (London, UK) marks his presence into complex historical situations through documentary drawings. For Common Destination, he presents small drawings of in-extant churches from the Western Balkans. The resulting images, like particles or island-like fragments, convey ideas of borders, territories, and communities. Olalekan Jeyifous (Brooklyn, NY) creates astonishing and intricate hand and computer-rendered drawings of science fiction space stations. Although trained as an architect, his proposals for new configurations of social spaces arise from a synthesis of random ideas and myriad influences. Yuri Leiderman (Cologne, Germany) produces a view on geopolitics that humorously defies translation. The drawings presented in Common Destination conflate symbols and images charged with incompatible ideologies to create an absurd outcome. Heidi Neilson (Long Island City, NY) draws language landscapes. In her work Atlas of Punctuation, she intensively layers acetate sheets, each containing punctuation traced from books related to cities and fantastical landscapes. Nusra Latif Qureshi (Melbourne, Australia), trained in the traditional Mughal miniature style, infuses classical Persian imagery with expressive line, collage, and commentary on colonialism. Stephen Shanabrook (New York, NY) traverses the taboo terrains of desire and violence to explore their paradoxical common ground. His recent project applies an alchemical approach by shredding and collaging drawings on slides in a viscous emulsion to make colorful projected kaleidoscopes captured on video. Dario Solman (New York, NY) explores perspective and landscape through marker drawings that depict the relationship of human emotion to technology and urban infrastructure. The drawings included in this exhibition present a geometric everyman, a human perspective that attempts to connect to the city grid. Sophie Tottie (Berlin, Germany) considers the problem of gaining an overall view on existential issues laden with historical and political references. For her installation at The Drawing Center, she presents, in multiple perspective, photo-drawings of detailed maps and lines of text taken from truth commission talks. Jina Valentine (San Francisco, CA) believes that the common thread of a community may be seen in the music albums that it consumes.