POP UP: GALLERY TWO

Jessica Drenk / Michael Berman

On view thru March 16, 2024

Michael P. Berman

Michael P. Berman wanders the terrain of the American West, Mexico, Norteno and the extensive grasslands of Mongolia. Mr. Berman’s classically executed black and white photographs participate in and extend the tradition of western landscape photography; each body of work is distilled from extensive exploration of a cohesive landscape over time. After completing a series of photographs he cuts up the negatives and prints and uses them as the basic medium for installations and paintings.

Michael P. Berman was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 to photograph the remnant grasslands of the Chihuahuan Desert. His photographs are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Amon Carter Museum and the Museum of New Mexico. In 2013, he received the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in New Mexico and has also been a recipient of Painting Fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Wurlitzer Foundation; his installations, photographs, and paintings have been reviewed in Art in America, and exhibited throughout the country. Berman’s work has been published in several books including Gila: Radical Visions; The Enduring Silence and the first and third books of a border trilogy with writer Charles Bowden, Inferno and Trinity. His most recent book, published by Museum of New Mexico Press, available October 2019, is Perdido: Sierra San Luis. 

Mr. Berman was born in New York City in 1956, and went west to Colorado College where he studied biology and worked with peregrine falcons before embracing his photographic exploration of the land. He lives in Southwestern New Mexico in the Mimbres Valley, and is a founding and current board member of the Gila Resources Information Project. He has received grant support for his photographic and environmental work from the McCune and Lannan Foundation.

Jessica Drenk

Jessica Drenk's practice subverts our notion of functional everyday materials. Tactile and textural, her sculpture and 2 dimensional works highlight the chaos and beauty that can be found in everyday objects. The work is also influenced by systems of information and the impulse to develop an encyclopedic understanding of the world. Employing a processed based approach, the artist sets out to cultivate the hidden potential within these often over looked materials. The result of these process is a range of complex objects that harken formations found in nature, blurring the boundary between nature and man made. 

Known and sought after for her compelling transformations that make use of common materials like Books, No2 pencils and PVC Pipes. Drenks newest work continues to push the boundaries of her creative practice by introducing, junk mail, and more recently archival book binding tape. In Drenks 2020 exhibition ‘Transmutations’  she introduced the ‘Aggregate’ series which transformed the viewer to rocks and ridges forged in the crucible of the earth long with 'Dendrite' (Q tips dipped  in plaster), The installation was recently curated as part of NADA x Foreland  2023 in NY. 

"My work is an inquiry into materiality: what makes up the objects that surround us as well as the composition of the natural world. I am interested in how parts combine to create a whole and the intricacies of shape and texture found in the world at every scale. In treating everyday objects as raw material to sculpt, I practice a form of conceptual alchemy: through physically manipulating these objects the meanings to material-a subversion of the meanings associated with it, and a reference to the life cycle of objects through time’

Jessica Drenk originally from Montana has an MFA in 3D art from the University of Arizona and a Bachelor’s Degree in Art from Pomona College. Drenks work can be found in private collections throughout the world and galleries across the United States.  Her work is a part of several corporate collections, such as that of Fidelity Investments, Frost Bank corporate office collection, UTSW Clements collections , TCU’s School of Education and The Macallan distillery in Scotland, as well as the Yale University Art Gallery and Huntington Museum of Art.  Drenk has been the recipient of several awards, including International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, and her work has been pictured in Sculpture, Curve and Interior Design magazines, as well as The Workshop Guide to Ceramics. A working artist since 2007, Drenk lives and works near Rochester, NY.