I started this series of drawings in the spring of 2020. At first the series was Hamtramck Power Lines, since I started making the drawings out of a desire to capture some of the more striking and chaotic complexes of power lines I see around Hamtramck, Michigan, the small, densely packed town in the middle of Detroit that I live in. The series became Power Lines Drawings after I started working from Detroit power lines, too, & I’ve branched out a bit to include other places I travel to sometimes.
8 x 10 black ink on paper
Prints available here
8 x 10 black ink on paper
Prints available here
In many ways, the power lines drawings are meditations. I draw from real power lines formations I encounter out in the world. A person could imagine similar messes of lines, but part of the point for me is that the real-world complexity of these formations often exceeds the messes we’d imagine. The drawings give me a concrete way of paying attention to a specific, overlooked element of the built environment around me while I’m moving through the world. The drawings themselves are really a simple sequence of lines I make following a found pattern—the power lines complex—that’s the result of human activity that has accumulated over time with no single intention or instance. My favorite lines to draw take quick, single strokes of the pen to look right. The power lines on the page, then, are each the result of a single gesture, and the drawings become a record of what the gestures look like all recorded together. If the drawings are thoughts, they’re a kind of thinking that’s done outside of my mind, performed by observing the material world and staying true to what I actually see there.
So what kinds of thoughts are these drawings? Hamtramck is the most densely populated municipality in Michigan, and one of the poorest. Detroit, which surrounds Hamtramck, was built out with an infrastructure for a population nearly twice what it is now. Decades of racist hostility towards Detroit and resource hoarding by suburbs and by the state of Michigan have left the infrastructure around here bloated and neglected, a patchwork of semi-functional fixes that look like it. People in Detroit and Hamtramck pay some of the highest rates in the country for utilities for some of the least reliable services. In some sense, these drawings are a record of what one aspect of this institutional neglect looks like.
8 x 10 black ink on paper
Prints avaiable here
But Detroit isn’t the only place power lines look like this. You can find absurd complexes of power lines and cables everywhere in this connected world, sometimes more carefully crafted but often just as makeshift and messy. They’re out there skirting industrial areas or strung across the most bustling modern streets. We don’t notice them or we ignore them because they’re supposed to be background, the obstinate, inconvenient material that builds up and breaks down everywhere in order to maintain the ostensibly seamless flow of information and capital. This is the world we all live in. These drawings are part of my way of trying to live through it.
I will keep posting drawings here as long as the project is going. You can also follow me on twitter (for now) and Mastodon (preferred) and instagram. Please consider supporting my work by visiting my storefront. If you would like to reach out to me about any of the drawings or the project as a whole, you can hit me up on twitter or instagram or else email me at marcusjmerritt /at/ gmail.