KUSTERA PROJECTS is pleased to present The Cold Wake, a site specific installation and exhibition by Drew Conrad. The exhibition will be on view from June 11 - July 17, 2016, with an opening reception on Saturday, June 11th, from 6-8pm.
The Cold Wake will consist of a large-scale free standing sculpture and a smaller wall-based assemblage that will work in tandem to create a larger installation within the gallery space. The exhibition will expand upon the artist's ongoing series of works referred to as Dwellings, sculptures whichuse the visual language of derelict architectural structures to simultaneously invoke the notion and act of lingering within the past. These fabricated ruins exist to further examine ideas of mortality, false and collective memory, and the domestic uncanny.
The largest aspect of the exhibition, Dwelling No. 11 (Jacobs Ladder), will mimic a vestige of a stilt house and it's accompanying paraphernalia; various architectural remnants including walls, a window, a door, and a small dock. Visually resting at a slight angle, the sculpture will appear to be sinking into the gallery floor or into the abyss. Moored by sandbags, anchors, and concrete blocks, the structure will have an overall sense of burden. At its highest reaching point, a rope ladder, referred to as a Jacobs Ladder by mariners, will lead upwards to the ceiling creating a precarious potential for ascension. The accompanying work, Untitled No. 1 (Buoy), will be a smaller wall-based assemblage that will compliment the larger Dwelling and expand upon the concurrent themes of failing equilibrium and strenuous opposites.
In The Horror of Red Hook, HP Lovecraft allowed his xenophobic outlook of the foreign and unknown to flood onto his pages, and in turn manifested Brooklyn into a direct portal to hell. Long before neighborhoods were officially given names like Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, there was just Red Hook and the more encompassing title of South Brooklyn. It was a vast saltwater marshland of shantytowns, outlanders, burgeoning mills, concrete casting, and shoreline shipping. This was ages before the swamps were filled, the storm surges of hurricanes, and Hoovervilles. Those derelict encampments of the Great Depression were a near lifetime after the local creek was deepened into a canal. The Dutch gave us the namesake of the Gowanus from an Algonquin chief. They gave us the name Roode Hoek from a shoreline point rich with iron oxide. The composition of that rusty soil is much like the red clay which lines the banks of the Catawba, a river that runs through the artist's hometown in South Carolina. It is a place of muddy waters, stories of a great flood, and the artist's southern heritage.
The Cold Wake is an exhibition and installation that is inspired from real, remembered, and imagined places. It is full of unbound specificity culled from locale history, the deep south, the pages of literature, and the passing of storms. It is a physical representation of a hazy recollection on a shoreline, almost forgotten; rising and receding like the water, not long for this world.
Drew Conrad was born in 1979 in Rock Hill, South Carolina. He received his BFA from the University of Georgia (2001) and his MFA from Parsons School of Design (2005). His work has been shown at Fitzroy Gallery, Get This Gallery, the University Galleries of Illinois State University, The Kentucky Museum of Arts and Crafts, Pioneer Works, and most recently at the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in NY. He has been the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship (2012), a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship (2014) and a Clocktower Residency at Pioneer Works (2014). Conrad's art has been featured in such publications as Sculpture Magazine, Art in America, Bad At Sports, Artsy, TimeOutNY, and Art Nerd New York.
Drew Conrad lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Gallery hours: Thursday - Sunday, 12 - 6pm, and by appointment.

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