Carolyn Drake, Suspicion, 2019
Pigment prints on cotton fabric, discarded clothing fragments, and acrylic paint, quilted, 50" x 63"
The Tusen Takk Channel is pleased to present an exhibition by artist-in-residence Carolyn Drake. Soon after moving to the city of Vallejo in California in 2016, Drake was invited to join a website called NextDoor, which promises to connect users with their neighbors. On the site, she encountered numerous warnings about ‘suspicious’ people lurking on the streets, linked to pixelated surveillance images, that seemed to provide a reason for people to feel afraid– afraid of the unknown other, afraid of the perceived dangers of the street.
In the latest chapter of her ongoing Next Door project, she collects, crops, prints, cuts, and stitches together visuals from the website. In doing so, she turns the supposedly dangerous materials into quilts, objects we normally think of as safe and intimate–Drake's response to a divide within a community that, as a photographer, she lives on both sides of. The artist interferes with the truth that this surveillance lays claim to and considers technology's role in how we understand the world around us.
Carolyn Drake with work-in-progress from her Next Door series
Tusen Takk, September 2023
ARTIST BIO
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.
THE TUSEN TAKK CHANNEL: AN ARTIST ENGAGEMENT SERIES
The Tusen Takk Channel is a partnership with Alluvion Arts @ 414 at Commongrounds in downtown Traverse City, MI. The Channel will feature Tusen Takk’s artists-in-residence in rotating exhibitions and in live programs at the Alluvion, all serving to anchor Tusen Takk’s public programming in the region.
Commongrounds is a real estate cooperative cultivating a more empowered community through cooperatively-owned places that connect people and actively integrate wellness, arts, family and food. The pilot project is a four-story mixed-use building at 414 E. Eighth Street, hosting a variety of nonprofit, business, and residential tenants; visual arts programming; and events and activities.
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