SITE DRAWING : DRAWING SITE – EXHIBITIONS AT ROBERT E AND MARTHA HULL LEE GALLERY, MIAMI UNIVERSITY, OHIO 2012 & STELLA ELKINS GALLERIES, PHILADELPHIA 2010

This project comprised 24 drawings and an accompanying interactive publication. Stella Elkins Galleries, Philadelphia in September 2010, part of a the Temple Gallery programs, connects Philadelphia to new artists and important conversations about art that circulate internationally and has recently shown work by Jesper Just, Seth Price, Berni Searle and Althea Thauberger, among many others. Through this curatorial policy Shepley, was invited to show drawings that were specially selected to demonstrate drawing’s particularised function in his studio methodology.

This touring solo exhibition focused on drawing as a method of making visually manifest the reflective conversation which takes place in the act of thinking and making. These drawing form a vital and procedural part of Shepley’s studio methodology which explore the nascent and propostitional aspects of the artwork. As such the drawings could be seen as site drawings and the exhibition evidenced their important and dynamic role in articulating what Shepley has previously referred to as the left over spaces in the studio that become the place of the work.

The subjects of these drawings i.e. tableaux, installations, are manipulated like collages – cut up and moved around, inverted, and similarly the drawings are produced in this way and can be initially understood as drawing sites exploring the un-making and the unfinished nature of the work.

The invitation to show these works was extended by the Robert E and Martha Hull Lee Gallery, Miami University, Ohio in 2012 and drawing continues as part of Shepley’s practice, most recently culminating in an invited show of selected new works By-Product-Exchange-Society at the Sam Scorer Gallery, Lincoln, 2013.