Series Series : Tony Lewis : Making Room for Drawing

SERIES SERIES is a series of interviews between a contemporary artist and curator Jacob Fabricius. Series Series is a casual conversation about work and life. The interviews are conducted through emails, text messages and meetings, and illustrated with images chosen by the artist. Tony Lewis (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA) harnesses the medium of graphite powder to confront such social and political topics as race, power, communication, and labor. The material provides a literal and conceptual foundation for the artist's work, as it is stretched, smudged, rubbed, spliced, and folded across a variety of handmade and found surfaces. Graphite powder is an inherently unruly medium, a substance that threatens to wander. Lewis nurtures this dispersal, allowing for the powder to build into a ubiquitous state that settles upon and indiscriminately marks paper surfaces; the graphite-slick studio floor becomes a "tool the same way a pencil is a tool."