CRAIG DRENNEN
Merchants, Bandits, and Certain Senators
(Blank Front) 2020, oil & alkyd on paper
Exhibition Details
April 16th — June 26th
Reception with the Artist: Friday, April 16th, 2021 4-9 PM
Laney Contemporary presents Craig Drennen: Merchants, Bandits, and Certain Senators, his first solo exhibition at the gallery. Since 2008, the Atlanta-based artist has used Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens to structure his studio practice and this exhibition title refers to the most recent three characters that he has addressed. Drennen’s interest in Timon of Athens stems from its position at the very edge of the Western canon and Drennen’s belief that edges become useful provisional zones that allow for new artistic potentials with fewer restrictions. The play itself deals with foolhardy spending, dubious loyalty, betrayal, and exile. Contemporary associations are grafted onto each characters’ artworks, moving fluidly through fiction and history, words and objects, Drennen himself and a 17th-century play. But Shakespeare is just a starting point.
The Merchant character recurs most often in this exhibition, every piece as circular as a coin or a record. Drennen first “activated” a record by putting a quarter into a laundromat jukebox as a boy in central West Virginia. Chores, coins, choices, spinning music, repeat. Elton John, the FAME soundtrack, and early DEVO all mix around and radiate recognition about one’s self and environment. (Miss You Jocko Homo), for instance, combines The Rolling Stones’ Miss You with Devo’s Jocko Homo. The painted albums slosh around in a sudsy, abstract mix, spinning within spinning, within the circular painted structure. The circular format is at once the coin and the record album, spinning time within the washing machine window. Time spins and slips between ages 5, 9, 20, and now. Certain Senators loops us back to a moment in 1972 when a first-grade Drennen voted for McGovern instead of Nixon in his class’s mock election. McGovern campaign buttons inform these works formally, aligning vintage political failure with the emotional bruises from a more recent presidential election. The Bandit works began in 2017 with Drennen’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia and use secular images from Santa, the tireless mythic giver.
The exhibition includes paintings on canvas and paper, a selection of small drawings, cast sculpture, and a single 35-second video projection entitled Timon of Athens. It lists Drennen’s versions of Shakespearean characters with punk undertones inspired by Robert Longo’s irreverent MTV version of his Men in the Cities (1988). The video loops like the accumulation of references presented throughout the gallery and is multiplied ad infinitum by the mirrored upstairs space. It plays with the editorial acts of inserting references without explanation, intervening into revered subjects, or mock-collaging ideas--in essence how Drennen makes a painting.
This exhibition marks the first time the Merchant pieces have ever been shown. Laney Contemporary organized this show with the idea that their exhibition space becomes a “stage” where Drennen’s pieces can interact or sometimes collide. In a world where we rely on small screens to provide first impressions of artworks, Drennen’s pieces greatly reward being seen in person. Merchants, Bandits, and Certain Senators cycles through the process of self-reflection as a crucial part of the act of painting that can be understood as a non-linear, un-framed, cognitive journey.
