Studio 34 is pleased to present Drawing is a Verb, an exhibition of large-scale drawings by Taney Roniger. Made over the last two years, the works explore not what drawings can mean or signify but rather what they can do to the body of the viewer.

Inspired by a book by Sarah Robinson titled Architecture is a Verb, Roniger began the series by thinking about how conditions of light can alter moods and states of consciousness. Soon she began thinking about spatial conditions as well, coming to focus on spaces that evoke our earliest ancestry as a species. Using charcoal because of the unique way it interacts with her paper’s surface, she began making drawings meant to evoke these earliest conditions. In the resulting series, settings such as the ocean, the horizon, and the forest become recurring motifs, appearing not in their literal form but by subtle suggestion. With their quietly rhythmic and luminous presence, the drawings communicate a deep sense of home.

For Roniger, the experience of the viewer is primary. “So much art these days is about the identity of the artist,” she says. “My work, by contrast, is all about the viewer. I want to make things that eclipse me altogether, things that speak of – and to – the body experiencing them.” In conceiving of her work as speaking to the body, Roniger’s ultimate aim is to create a physical experience of our continuity with the natural world. “If I do my job right,” she says, “even the viewer will be eclipsed. Ideally, all that will be left will be a deeply felt sense of belonging to the world.”

In conjunction with the exhibition, the gallery will host a conversation between Roniger and artist, writer, and curator Daniel Hill. The event will take place on Friday, April 7^that 6:00pm.

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Taney Roniger is an artist and writer based in New York. A painter for many years, she has recently turned to drawing, finding it to be the most direct visual expression of the intelligence of the human body. Her work has been shown in a number of venues here and abroad, including: Robert Henry Contemporary, Lesley Heller Workspace, Sperone Westwater, The Islip Art Museum, and StandPipe Gallery in New York; the Contemporary Arts Center and The Front in New Orleans; and the Pera Museum in Istanbul, Turkey. Her awards and honors in the visual arts include three Yaddo fellowships, a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and a traveling fellowship from the Stacey Sussman Cavrell Memorial Foundation. Since 2012, she has been a contributing writer at The Brooklyn Rail, for which she served as Guest Editor in December 2017. Her writing has also appeared in Interalia, Hyperallergic, Whitehot Magazine, Big Red & Shiny, Transverse, and On-Verge. In 2016 she was a finalist for the Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant in short-form non-fiction. Over the last ten years she has organized numerous arts-related symposia, among them Thingly Affinities: Rethinking Aesthetic Form for a Posthumanist Future, Beyond Kandinsky: Revisiting the Spiritual in Art, Strange Attractors: Art, Science, and the Question of Convergence, and Stop the Interrogation, a critical look at nonsense language in the visual arts. She holds an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, where she teaches in the Fine Arts Department and Honors Program.

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