Fences restrict bodies and curtains cover windows; these are features intended to exclude. Barriers also provoke curiosity, and the gaze finds a way through. Christopher Culver’s quietly atmospheric drawings collapse the distinction between interior and exterior, between hiding and revealing. Rendered carefully but not preciously with charcoal and pastels, these works offer enigmatic glimpses of curious spaces and occasional people. A spacious room with two fans in the window and a black coat hanging from a pillar shows much but reveals little. Meanwhile, a chain-link fence with meandering curls of barbed wire offers its quietly expressive presence. These images feel muted and inconclusive, and this adds to their allure. 

The dichotomy between interior and exterior provides a point of entry to this work, but this distinction quickly falls apart. Some of the drawings overtly conflate these supposedly separate realms. Sections of fence intrude on a drawing of a room with two windows—curtains neatly tied. Scattered bits of litter at the base of the fence add to the sense of defilement. This room can no longer sustain its separation from the city that contains it. Another work depicts a man staring at his phone while laying in the bathtub, an intimate moment that manages to remain vague and impersonal. A naked man on all fours presents himself, but the encounter feels frozen and distant; much less sexually charged than it should be. These inversions fuel the obscurity that draws me to this work.

To draw with charcoal and pastel involves rubbing colorful dirt into the fibers of a sheet of paper. The precarity of the medium adds to the mysterious quality of these images. They are elegantly composed clouds of dust that soon might disperse. These drawings hold open a space for silence, and so it feels fitting that their physical presence is delicate. These surfaces are sensitive in that they convey minute moments, but also in that they can be easily smudged. In a moment of extremely loud and manipulative visual culture, Culver’s works provide a refreshing opportunity for immersion in quietly radical spaces. 

Peter Brock

January 2021