OTHERWORLDLY: SELECT DRAWINGS: STEPHEN TALASNIK

Featuring a substantive selection of black and white drawings spanning the last twenty-plus years of his career, this exhibition explores the pictorial achievements of an artist who has pushed technical drawing beyond mark making to an experience with, as Lebbeus Woods noted, “this power to fascinate, confound, and reveal.” Through Stephen Talasnik’s hand we experience an adventure into an imagined world at the intersection of drawing and building.

Stephen Talasnik’s drawings explore otherworldly landscape and objects that evoke childhood memories. “If there was ever a moment of divine inspiration, it would be the instance I saw the General Motors’ Futurama exhibition and the Panorama of the City of New York at the 1964 Fair,” said Talasnik. “A lifelong obsession with visionary architecture was established at the Fair and I started doing drawings and sculptures of future cities after wandering through the Pavilions.”

Originally from Philadelphia, Talasnik grew up in an urban neighborhood surrounded by oil refineries, a shipyard, a helicopter factory, and an airport, immersing him in the aesthetics of industrial building. He lived in a house that bordered a local creek, providing him an opportunity to unearth the past as he searched for fossils imbued with fictional narratives. He turned these experiences into a world explored through drawing with pencil and building complex structures from wood.

Talasnik has spent the better part of sixty years inventing the past and envisioning and documenting the future. His work is informed by time travel and myth-making, intrigued with the infrastructure of the urban environment. The work is, as the title of the exhibition indicates, otherworldly, suggesting a moment in time without providing absolute coordinates. Often defined as “Fictional Engineering”, he uses no system of measurement, relying on the aesthetics of intuition and invention.

Working in his Brooklyn studio and ever informed by intuitive engineering and the human form, Talasnik continues to explore the unlimited capacity of the fictional object and landscape. Seduced by a visionary’s mantra, he relies on his personal encyclopedia of experience to define an imagined world that explores the visual capacity of a self-defined beauty. Archeological in nature, the viewer is invited to examine a personalized lexicon; extracting clues but challenged to determine specific identity. Employing pencil or wood, Talasnik’s works must always suggest the unfinished yet complete.