DREW SHIFLETT: Patches, Strands, Collage — Drawing
April 30 - June 5, 2022
VIEW THE EXHIBITION CHECKLIST HERE
The Arts Center at Duck Creek is pleased to present Drew Shiflett: Patches, Strands, Collage —Drawing, opening on Saturday, April 30, and on view through June 5, 2022. A reception for the artist will be held from 3-5 pm on Saturday, April 30.
Merriam-Webster’s definition of drawing falls terribly short of Drew Shiflett’s interpretation of the same term. Although “the art or technique of representing an object or outlining a figure, plan, or sketch by means of lines” does indeed describe an aspect of Shiflett’s work, it is only one of the many processes she uses to produce a work of art. “Regardless of what form my artwork takes,” Shiflett says, “drawing is the main impetus behind the work. While in the process of making each piece, I find myself straddling novel combinations of drawing, relief, and sculpture.” Shiflett’s drawings are built from a range of materials, including handmade paper, fabric, glue and canvas, often tinted with watercolor or marked in conte crayon. The closer you get to each work, the more your preconceived ideas of these materials start to unravel. Shiflett embraces the idiosyncrasies of her medium in subtle ways, encouraging the buckling behavior of dampened paper, or the strata formed by a change in materials. These more capricious aspects of the work reveal not only the spontaneity with which they were built, but their authentic and organic individuality. A macro view of these works presents us with the order of architecture, the larger structures in our lives, like armies in formation or an aerial view of a city. But on closer inspection, a cellular level of complexity unfolds in their topography. We begin to see the labyrinthian density of the grids upon grids, the sheer thickness of it all belying its delicate ingredients.
In his essay for Shiflett’s solo exhibition at Lesley Heller Gallery in 2017, Raphael Rubinstein, too, emphasized the force of the intimate and the overt in her work by way of the textile theorist and practitioner Anni Albers. Rubinstein, quoting Albers, alludes to her argument “that the ‘quality of the inner structure’ was what distinguished textiles from painting, sculpture and architecture.” He continues, “Paintings, she held, depend on ‘surface qualities,’ while in woven works the ‘qualities of the inner structure are as much part of a textile, as are effects of outer tactile surface.’ This means that when we look at textile art it’s vital to pay attention to what Albers called the ‘intricate interplay’ between surface and structure. This is precisely what happens in Shiflett’s work in which our reading of the overall composition as a slightly undulating plane of joined grids and rows of parallel lines is, after the first second or two, inextricably intertwined with our noticing of the underlying structure. From then on ‘inner structure’ and ‘tactile surface’ cannot be separated.”
Drew Shiflett (b.1951, Chicago, IL) received her BA from Columbia College Chicago and her MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Shiflett has had solo exhibitions at Lesley Heller Gallery, The InterArt Center, White Columns, and Fashion Moda (New York, NY); Guild Hall Museum and The Drawing Room (East Hampton, NY); and Islip Art Museum (East Islip, NY). Her work has also been shown nationally and internationally at institutions including The Drawing Center (New York, NY), Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC), Sculpture Center (New York, NY), Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, (Louisville, KY), A&A Gallery at the Yale University School of Art (New Haven, CT), Baltimore Museum of Art, and Kunststiftung K52 (Berlin, Germany). Shiflett’s work has been highlighted in numerous publications including The New York Times, Art in America, The Wall Street Journal, and The Huffington Post. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts award in printmaking/drawing/book arts and in sculpture; a Mid Atlantic/NEA Regional Visual Arts Fellowship award in sculpture; and a Guggenheim Fellowship award in fine arts. She lives and works in New York City.
Image credit: Jeffrey Scott French
Image caption: Untitled #92 (Dachshunds) — detail, 2021, graphite, watercolor, canvas, handmade paper, 43 1/2 x 33 1/4 x 1 inches
For further information about this exhibit, contact duck@duckcreekarts.org
For more information about the artist, visit www.drewshiflett.com
