Carolyn Drake

2023 Artist-in-Residence

Jul 27

Carolyn Drake was born in California and studied Media/Culture and History in the early 1990s at Brown University. Following her graduation, she moved to New York and worked as an interactive designer for many years before departing to engage with the physical world through photography. After living in Istanbul and Ukraine and working internationally for a decade, she returned to the US in 2013 to work on more self reflective projects close to home.

Her work has been supported by a Guggenheim fellowship, the Peter S. Reed Foundation, Lightwork, the Lange Taylor prize, a Fulbright fellowship, and the Henri Cartier Bresson Award, among others. Recent exhibitions include Wild Pigeon at SFMOMA, Isolation Therapy at SFMOMA, Knit Club at the McEvoy Foundation, Knit Club at ICP, and Untitled Men at the Henri Cartier Bresson Foundation. Drake has authored five books and is a member of Magnum Photos. She is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery.

Carolyn Drake, Installation view *Knit Club* at McEvoy Foundation, San Francisco, CA

Artist Statement

Carolyn Drake works on long term photo-based projects seeking to interrogate dominant historical narratives and creatively reimagine them. Her practice embraces collaboration and has in recent years melded photography with sewing, collage, and sculpture. She is interested in collapsing the traditional divide between author and subject, the real and the imaginary, challenging entrenched binaries.

At Tusen Takk

During the pandemic lockdown between 2020 and 2021, Carolyn began waking up early in the mornings to build temporary sculptures from materials in her backyard and making photo-portraits of them before the wind rushed in to knock them down. As the project evolved, she played with the idea of giving sight to the sculptures by embedding surveillance cameras in them. Having given them the power to return her gaze, she began to think of the sculptures as cyborgs or creature friends.

At Tusen Takk, Carolyn plans to work with the footage that the sculptures captured, taking what they saw, and printing, cropping, and stitching them into co-authored self-portraits. She wonders what the pieces will look like side by side - her photographed sculptures and their visions, remade by her.

This is a continuation of Carolyn's work bringing together aspects of photography, sculpture, sewing, surveillance, and collaboration. She may also work with other forms of surveillance data she has amassed over the years, including images of "suspicious people" posted online by her neighbors and images captured by her own surveillance cameras of her friends attempting to sleep.