Beams and Glowing Eyes
In this room the eyes are lamps. Twenty-one works from May 2022 share one device: a head or a creature whose eyes give off light, and a beam that crosses the square like a searchlight. Where the light lands, the drawing goes pale and the lines show through it. Where it does not, the ground stays dense, scribbled in olive, red and blue.
The light takes two forms. In the framed heads it is a hard wedge, drawn as a solid band of pale yellow laid over everything, with a bright white disc where it starts. In the painted creatures, the bears and the hooded figure, it is a halo, soft at the edges, with round spots of glare floating in it like dust in a projector.
Twelve of the works came in five days, May 7 to 11. The rest arrived in a second run ten days later. Watch what the beam does to the thing it comes from: it fixes where you look, and it turns the rest of the head into shadow.
Five Days in May
Six framed heads open the room, drawn between May 7 and 9. Each one is packed to the frame with marks, and each one is cut by a beam.
NNOTB #73
A head tips to the right inside a tan frame, two square eyes glowing white, and a beam spills out of them toward the lower right corner. The mouth is a panel of upright teeth, lit from the same source. Around the head the ground is a weave of olive, yellow and blue scribble, with orange fence posts along the bottom. The light is drawn as a pale band laid over all of it, so the scribble shows through the beam like a pattern through gauze.
NNOTB #74
Turned on its side, a machine of a head: a bar of four round dials, a stack of triangles, a grid for a cheek, and beams crossing the whole thing on the diagonal.
NNOTB #75
One huge round eye on the left throws a wide beam down and to the right, past a small square eye and a grinning row of teeth.
NNOTB #76 cash lightning
The same head again, under green light. The drawing is the one from #75 with the colors shifted: the beam is lime, the eye has a spiral in it, and the whole ground has gone cool. Its title is the only one in the room with words, cash lightning. Set the two side by side and the difference is the light alone, warm on one and acid on the other, falling on identical lines.
Compare with #75, in this room
Bears and Helmets
Two days, May 9 to 11, and six works. A furry creature appears twice, once with its eyes lit and once in the dark, and then the heads put on helmets.
NNOTB #79
A round, furry creature with two enormous glowing eyes squats on a patch of grass, orange stripes behind its head, its paws folded over its belly.
NNOTB #80
The same creature, half an hour later, with the lights off. It sits in plain black now, inside a white border, and its eyes are two dark spirals where the lamps were. The fur is the same hatching, the paws are the same, the belly has the same pale patch. Without the glow the creature looks smaller and more worried, and the drawing is mostly shadow.
Compare with #79, in this room
Eyes Like Lamps
After nine days away the glow comes back bigger. From May 20 to 22 the eyes become whole lamps, and two of the creatures start to speak.
NNOTB #86
A head with a mop of wild yellow and black hair, a thin neck, and two orbs of light for eyes, each one larger than the mouth beneath it.
NNOTB #90
A teddy bear with sparking antennae sits in a burst of orange rays, its eyes two small lamps and the word BULLISH written across its chest.
NNOTB #93
A head in white scribble over pink and orange, two beams driving to the right out of the eyes, three orange drips hanging from the top.
NNOTB #94
A tower-like head with two glowing square eyes beaming right, over dense black and white scribble.
NNOTB #95
An armored figure in black and gold, with a visor and one red eye, points a finger under a sky of blue rays.
Two More Bears and a Skull
The room closes with the largest drawings in it: a hooded figure holding lights, a bear with glowing goggles, a wolf with a slogan, and a skull mask lit from inside.
NNOTB #97
Inside a dark frame a hooded, bearded figure with glowing eyes holds out a hand, and round spots of light float around it like bubbles.
NNOTB #99
A bear sits on a white ground, painted in soft grey and gold, its eyes hidden behind red goggles that glow. Two beams leave the goggles toward the lower left. On its shoulder, almost too small to see, stands a tiny figure. The bear is drawn with long, careful painted strokes, its paws resting on its knees, and the white around it is cloudy, not flat. At 817 recorded strokes, no other work in the room took as much drawing.
NNOTB #100
A wolf-like creature with tall ears and glowing eyes bares its teeth in the dark, beside the words STILL BULLISH in orange.
NNOTB #113
A skull mask fills a brown frame, its two eyes glowing yellow like headlamps, a beam falling from them to the lower right. Blue tubes rise from the top of the head, a crown of red zigzag runs under the cheekbone, and a necklace of white beads hangs across the jaw. The ground is a curtain of brown scribble. It is the last of the framed heads, and the one where the eyes and the beam are the same yellow as the paint.
Closing
Go back to the bear with its lights on, and then to the bear with its lights off. Everything in the drawing is the same except the eyes, and the whole mood of the creature changes with them. That is what the room is about: a drawn light that decides where you look, and what you can see of the rest.