Gladiator, Vinyl adhesive,
varable dimensions, 1998

In Gorman's work, it is impossible to separate form from content. The artist will focus on the peculiar qualities and associations of her media, drawing these qualities out to create burlesque hybrids. When the artist paints, or draws, or unfurls meters of colored vinyl across gallery walls, it appears that she does so in celebration of each medium's more abject tendencies. This is an aspect of Gorman's work that exists to its detriment as much its favor. In this case, the associations of her material ­ signwriter's vinyl ­ find their resonance in the work's resemblance to text and architectural decoration.

Gorman's work has drawn on the tradition of installation practice that centres on the gallery ­ as a specific location and as an historical site ­ as the subject of the artist's work. Usually, these practices focus not only on the architecture of the actual space, but also on the theorized separateness of the gallery from the world outside it. Attempts to bring the world into the gallery, or to make such divides between cultures inside and outside visible, most often function to shore up the historical status quo, rather than to undermine it.

Gorman's site specificity takes in temporal as well as physical locations. In the hip-hop style of graffiti executed on the trains in the rail yards nearby her inner-city studio, Gorman has found a precedent for site specific works that actively intervene into a space. The inherently physical nature of Gorman's technique and choice of scale mark her practice as one of intervention, in specific sites and the body of history as a whole. Unlike the polite and distanced dialogue with the space (or its surrounds) that is usually the order of such activities, Gorman's tone is aggressive. Her large decorative motif in maroon, lime and gold, which careers from the rear wall to the left, is a piece of compositional unbalancing carried out with a sinister chuckle. For Gorman, the gallery is a site wherein tensions between cultures ­ popular and high, official and marginal ­ are played out in a continuing round of encounters.

Before Gorman's intervention, the wall drawing was already a hybridised form. The wall drawing is a cousin of the mural but with all the associations of severe objectivity that mark the minimalist and installation-based practices from which it emerged in the 1960s. Contemporary examples of this form expand the wall drawing's frame of reference to include the decorative or the representational ­ as elegantly expressed in recent wall drawings by Sol Le Witt and our own Tony Clark. By increasing the scope of the wall drawing's genetic pool, contemporary proponents of the form have imbued the form with a new vitality.

The use of twisting, entangled lines and the skewed placement within the gallery impart an eerily organic quality to Gorman's work. These works give the impression of arrested movement, threatening to further mutate into a more unlikely form once the viewer's back is turned. This quality is enhanced by the likenesses to text, decoration, or representational schema which lurks beneath the vinyl skin of Gorman's work. They are lively forms in the process of becoming, in much the same way that the language virus of Burroughs' famous axiom constantly mutates in the body of its host.

Andrew McQualter
August 1998

© The artist and
Courtesy of the artist.

Gladiator, Vinyl adhesive,
varable dimensions, 1998

Gladiator, Vinyl adhesive,
varable dimensions, 1998