Drawing’s Reciprocity brings together drawings and drawing-related works by Kelly Chorpening, Rebecca Fortnum, Marina Kassianidou, Marius Lehene and Katrin Ströbel at Colorado State University’s Hatton Gallery. Their practices explore drawing as a form of attention and a way of building relationships with the people, places, objects and encounters that shape everyday life.

The exhibition considers drawing as a reciprocal process: artists respond to their surroundings, while materials, chance and what they encounter influence the work in return. What emerges can exceed the artist’s intentions, revealing connections and experiences that were not apparent at the outset.

Each artist approaches these exchanges differently. Chorpening’s assemblages and drawings attend to objects in states of strength, fragility, transformation and decay. Fortnum’s drawings of historical sculptures connect her drawing hand with the sculptor’s hand and the material histories behind their works. Kassianidou brings ancestral histories, material traces and marks made by people and the nonhuman world into relation. Ströbel explores drawing as a social, political and bodily gesture, addressing freedom, resistance, connection and the tensions between protection and violation. Lehene translates the physical experience of movement into spatial relationships, reflecting experiences of navigating between places, cultures and identities.

A collaborative photographic series extends these explorations through a shared act of noticing. Participating artists photograph the “drawings” they encounter around them: imprints left by people and animals, accidental arrangements of objects, converging forms and marks, and familiar shapes perceived in unexpected places. These photographs draw attention to fleeting details that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

Together, the works ask how drawing can encourage more intimate connections with our surroundings, particularly when so much of our attention is mediated by the phone in our hand. Drawing’s Reciprocity invites visitors to consider what becomes visible when we allow the world to participate in the act of drawing—and how this attentiveness might shape the ways we live alongside others.

Date/Time
Date(s) - November 20, 2026 - January 29, 2027
9:00 am - 4:00 pm

Location
Hatton Gallery, Visual Arts Building

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