Townsend’s time-based drawing practice fuses mark-making, duration, and temporality to render monuments to moments as they pass. Big ideas and questions about time, presence, duration, obsession, and mark-making drive the work; however, simple details, relationships, and limitations construct the systems that animate the drawing act. His meditative works range from intimately scaled, delicate drawings that aggregate hours on paper to large-scale, public pieces that accumulate days of marking at the scale of architecture. 

Kevin Townsend working on a large-scale drawing installation at the Crossroads Hotel in KC

Townsend’s large-scale works are composed, rendered, and exhibited on-site, directly on urban surfaces, the facades of buildings, or the walls of museums, and galleries in cities across the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia. The drawings are decidedly low entropy arrangements that do not feel like a random collection of lines. Each mark is a tic of the clock, a thought, a decision, and action made in a moment of the perceptual present, oriented to the other moments recorded before it. The accumulated marks evoke swarms, fields, clouds, flows, or topographies that index the passage of time and a laboring body’s movement through space.

At Home In Time will be on view in the Studios Inc Exhibition Hall.