What Are You Working On Now? Erin K Drew
Erin Drew. Road Show. Micron, colored pen and mixed media on gridded LIFE notebook paper. Dimensions vary.
What are you working on now? is a Couch in the Desert series where we ask artists what they are making and thinking about in and outside the studio.
Erin K Drew
I regularly keep journals, but lately they have been just a little *too* introspective, so I decided to keep a distinct journal to track and illustrate quotes from art-related reading.
This has been a low stakes way to generate imagery--working with Micron pens in inexpensive little notebooks with lightweight gridded paper as opposed to on pristine sheets of Rives BFK. Throughout these journals I've developed and revisited visual motifs and made unexpected connections. Conceptual cul-de-sacs include gender and geography, "folk art" and vernacular forms, ornament, abjection and architecture.
Many of these pages were started in Glendale's Brand Library, a stunning Indo-Gothic mansion with ample table space and an ice cold HVAC system, and completed on the clock at the Museum of Neon Art where I work as an educator/gallery guide. Influences from these sites have drifted in as well. (Brand Library has a reproduction painting of Judith beheading Holofernes in its computer lab!)
Sources cited:
Elizabeth Wilson, "The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder and Women," University of California Press, 1991
What is a Public? and Dykewalks Instagram accounts
Women and Environments Magazine, 1983
Mackenzie Wark, "The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International," Verso, 2015
Rebecca Solnit, "As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art," University of Georgia Press, 2001
National Gallery of Art, "Outliers and American Vanguard Art," 2018
Center for Land Use Interpretation, "Subterranean Renovations: The Unique Architectural Spaces of Show Caves," 1998
Lisa Stone & Jim Zanzi, "Sacred Spaces and Other Places: A Guide to Grottos and Sculptural Environments in the Upper Midwest," School of the Art Institute Press, 1993
Myvillages ed. "The Rural," Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art, 2019
Ruba Katrib ed. 'Nikki de Saint Phalle: Structures for Life," MOMA PS1, 2021
Sally Munt, "The Lesbian Flaneur," 1994
Sadiya Hartman, "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals," Norton, 2019
Lisa Robertson, "Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture," Clear Cut Press, 2003
Walker Art Center, "Naives and Visionaries," Dutton, 1974
Kathi Hofer, "Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village," Spector Books, 2021
Erin Drew. Kathy Acker action figures. Micron, colored pen and mixed media on gridded LIFE notebook paper. Dimensions vary.
Erin K Drew is an interdisciplinary artist, arts organizer, researcher and educator. Ongoing interests include American semiotics and folk forms, place, class, education and entertainment. She has written and documented visual culture from her vantage extensively through her blog Extreme Appearances.
See more of Erin’s work on her website and on Instagram.
Images courtesy of the artist.
Posted and published by Ellie Rush on November 8, 2023