NEW CANAAN, CONN.- Heather Gaudio Fine Art is presenting Jessica Drenk: Reclaimed Topographies, the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. The show features newly created works and will run January 28th-March 11th, 2023.
Drenk is known for creating eye-catching transformations with commonplace manufactured objects, such as pencils, books, PVC pipe, and even Q-tips. The artist’s wall and floor sculptures and installations explore the effects of accumulation and aggregation through a labor-intensive process that recontextualizes the material to evoke natural phenomena. Drenk’s artworks impress in scale and detail, and close examination reveals the wonders of the nuanced materials and structures that create the whole. While she questions our relationship with consumerism and mass-production, Drenk’s proposal to alternative notions on humankind’s footprint on the world, space and time is ultimately an aesthetic gesture, with materials repurposed to visually poetic ends.
The exhibition features Drenk’s most recent Aggregate series, a new body of work that takes the artist’s investigations to another realm, regenerating materials that would naturally end up in a landfill. For this series, Drenk uses junk mail and other printed paper, turning them into reliefs resembling geological formations. The artist cuts, manipulates, and glues the sheets into layers, alternating and varying them according to color, finish, texture, and weight of the sheets. Once hardened from the applied glue and archival coating, the accumulated stacks are spliced, cut, and sanded into shapes that evoke topographic slices, strata, or even basalt organ pipes formed from ancient volcanic activity. Another wondrous series, Contours, consists of layered planks of plywood that have been artfully carved and ground to appear like eroded stone or terrains worn down by natural forces.
The exhibition also features an ambitious, if but intricate, site-specific installation entitled Dendrite, created with accumulations of an extremely ordinary artifact, the Q-tip. Clustered together, they from branches that proliferate from the ceiling down the wall to colonize the floor, reminiscent of organic materials such as calcified vines or frosted pine needles. Other works in the show that hint at nature are carved marble sculptures taking on the appearance of icebergs or other ephemeral iced formations. Drenk has enjoyed a prolific career since earning her MFA in 2007. She has been the subject of many solo and group exhibitions and her works are in many notable private and corporate collections, including Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven; Fidelity Investments in Boston; and Bank of America in Houston.
