Membership Edition

Lucy Skaer

Listening for Trouble, 2023

Machine drawn, graphite on paper
23 3/8 x 33 1/8 in.

50 unique drawings

Lucy Skaer is a contemporary artist who works with sculpture, film, painting, and drawing. “Time is always present in my work,” she says of art that slows down perception to make abstraction concrete.

Her Membership Edition is based on a new body of work that she created as an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation. Inspired in part by Marfa’s ranching history, Skaer posed the question: How do animals perceive enclosure? The old wooden pens at the local stockyards served as a reference for a set of drawings, which were also informed by a nineteenth-century treatise on agricultural structures—a large volume she toted from Scotland. As the embodiment of an idea, each drawing is a perceptual space in which rough stockyard boards have been reduced to silvery silhouettes detached from any structure. These faint forms appear to block the composition like an enclosure blocks an animal’s vision.

To execute her idea, Skaer used a drawing machine. It was a tabletop device that plugged into her laptop computer and rapidly moved a little arm, holding a pencil, over a piece of paper. Weaving back and forth, laying down one line at a time, the machine kept the artist busy supplying it with fresh lead.

Join or renew your upper-level membership today to receive this edition.

Please note: Chinati is unable to reserve or guarantee a specific Lucy Skaer drawing, and members who join at the Partner level or above will receive their pieces unframed.