throughline

This exhibition is a culmination of drawings created by Drawing Room founder, Renée DeCarlo over the past 20+ years. Her explorations with various processes that pull from the origins of mark-making and experimental layering has culminated in a variety of bodies of works pushing those inquiries. At the core of it all are her black and white, ink on paper motion drawings which are the source of everything. 

Renée studied sculpture at both SDSU and the U of O. In both schools, she found clay to be her primary medium. Once in graduate school, she discovered the art of wood fire and other atmospheric firing techniques - which pushed her from sculpture into drawing and installation art. Renée went to school to become a teacher and then realizing quickly after graduating that she didn't have the life -experience to teach what she wanted to, she dove into her studio practice and learning how to navigate the art world. Living in DC and through 911, then to Denver in hopes of snowboarding all the time ( that never happened!), and then back to California, finally landing in San Francisco. 

Moving to SF in 2003, Renée started showing her work at salons and local small arts venues and taking advantage of any opportunity to show her work. During that time, she also got married and had her son in 2004 and her second in 2007. Motherhood brought a whole new world of inspiration and challenges. Time and focus being the biggest challenges. The continual world of discovery for her boys that she observed daily was her inspiration. During that time, Renee started to use digital processes to build her drawings from her pen and ink drawings - playing with Illustrator to manipulate a line drawing into a whole new matrix of layers and colors. Her drawings with pen on paper never ceased, she would draw constantly while also reading the NYer - mostly for the fiction at that time. Full time motherhood and all that it involves, took away the time and space for her to play in a messy studio and explore the materials. However her drawings were always relevant to her life directly and have evolved over time. At first it was tracking her own body's motion on a plan or in the car to make the initial marks that she'd build her drawing from Then it became about obeserving other people's body's through a landscape. Particularly, skateboarders at the skatepark as her boys as the subjects and for years. Renee spent a lot of time sitting at the skateparks watching her boys hurl themselves around a landscape filled with tiny details, seemingly invisible bumps and ledges most people don't even notice.

Renee's line drawings would then go through a series of digital processes, layering color and line to build complicated drawings, derived from a simple wingly line. This process, though exciting also felt removed from "the hand" - and for a sculptor, the need to do something physical with the printed images took her into tearing them up, perforating them with a sewing machine, hand stitching and collaging them and building panels covering in dozens of panels in tiny pieces of many different drawings. 

When her studio time opened up with her boys in school, Renée started working in a studio off-site and with other artists. Learning how to silk screen and make large pieces transformed the scale and trajectory of Renee's work. Screen printing her drawings as just line drawings opened a whole new world to her composition and continuous exploration of pigments and mark-makers. 

In 2018, Renée founded the Drawing Room to get her studio into a more public realm - allowing her to share her process, work and side passion for curation. Alongside her studio, she also curated a small gallery with local artists with work centered around many different, yet relevant topics such as mental health, graffiti, farm worker rights and the study of birds. COVID has brought chapters of new turns and adventures with space, artist project and navigating the arts in SF - a city struggling in almost every way. This part of Renée's life is also reflected in her work - as her studio practice is still active and prolific. Making time to make art is no stranger - it's constant, even as motherhood's needs have waned, entrepreneurship, community activism and space making for many to allow synergistic opportunities to happen. Art is life. Life is Art.