Greg Drasler
On the Lam
September 8 – October 15, 2011
Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm
Opening: Thursday, September 8th 6 – 8 PM
On Thursday September 8, 2011, Betty Cuningham Gallery will open the season with Greg Drasler: On the Lam, an exhibition of new paintings and his third solo show at the gallery. An opening reception for the artist will be held on September 8th, from 6 – 8 PM.
Drasler, in these highly polished uncanny paintings, constructs the elsewhere and disruptions of travel as if reinventing the wheel. With auto interiors, patterns and suspended objects, the manifold directions of the imagination is a back seat driver steering into bursts of symbolic coincidence. The objects have the capacity of vehicles and the vehicles are all interior. Littered with cameras, trailers, books, tents and a ski lift, the paintings remain unusually vacant yet preoccupied. This pile up of instruments, tools, patterns and apparel accumulates and reads as words in a sentence, a visual sentence, which is the painting.
Taking its title from the largest painting in the show the exhibition insinuates encampment as a destination. On the Lam (70 x 160 inches) is crowded with trailers, tents and wagons that attract with a variety of doors, windows, vents and flaps. In the constructed panoramic sky, complete with camp fire plume, hovers a bicycle wheel, either spun out or loosened from its sprockets. In the place below, where the rubber hits the road, the painting gives us means-to-move and places-to-be.
Born in Waukegan, IL, Greg Drasler received a BFA and MFA from the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana. He has exhibited regularly in the US since the mid 80's. Widely collected privately, Drasler’s work can be seen in the collections of Dow Jones, Inc., New York; Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL; University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana, IL; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; The Emily Fisher Landau Collection, New York and Thurston Twigg-Smith, Honolulu, HI.
Drasler has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1993 and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 1991. He is currently an Associate Professor at Pratt Institute and has also taught at Princeton University.
The current exhibition will remain on view through October 15, 2011 and is accompanied by an on-line catalogue at www.bettycuninghamgallery.com
Click below for full press release.
The result manifests in “Stratocaster Suite,” a series of six luminous 70 x 400 inch oil-painted panels Drasler created for the show. Stretching across the length of a room, “Stratocaster Suite” is an ode to the open road.
Drasler is fond of metaphors. For instance, he once noted in an interview, “I think about the car as a camera, and painting as a vehicle.” But a vehicle for what? In a conversation, condensed and lightly edited below, Drasler expanded on this metaphor and other symbols contained within his work.
Entering the Castle Gallery at the College of New Rochelle, visitors encounter an arrangement of cherry blossoms in a glass vase. At least that’s what it appears to be. Closer observation reveals that the branch holding the flowers is actually a segment of plumbing pipe and that each delicate bud is a tiny pink toilet made of urethane foam.
