A_Place Gallery - Sam Drake

A_Place Gallery is delighted to present a solo exhibition of recent works by Sam Drake.

In this exhibition, Sam Drake presents three recent paintings. They are three depictions of the same scene or moment in time. A garden environment occupied by several elongated figures with a house in the distance, closed off by a large gate and driveway. This seems like a simple enough scene, but there is a distinct sense of unease. The images are dominated by an impenetrable tangle of branches - the smallest work is nothing but. Wildness and untameable nature interrupts what should be a cultivated garden belonging to a wealthy house. These figures are surely the gardeners, but only one is doing any work. One is languorous, the other is skulking around. Our consternation is heightened by the sheer wall topped with barbs, the spiked shadow thrusting into the frame, the CCTV camera.

Drake’s recent work has been exploring scenes inspired by fiction. He is interested in the way that painting can be used to reflect, in a more suspended way, the feelings that literature and film can provoke. The constellation of images present in this show are derived from the novel “Paradais” by the Mexican author Fernanda Melchor. Set in a gated community where the protagonist works as a gardener, the story juxtaposes the class divide between the wealthy residents and the service workers who keep the landscape looking pristine and manicured - ‘Paradise’, as the community is called. Yet underneath the edenic lawns and shrubbery is a darker, more violent reality.

Drake’s paintings are more suggestive than they are one-to-one depictions of any given scene in the narrative. The works are concerned with the themes found in the text, but they are also interested in the gap between the written word and the image, something that Drake is calling to our attention by showing three works of the same moment. We are being led to imagine three separate frames of one point in time, like a tracking shot in a film that, depending on which painting you begin with, is either slowly zooming in or out, centering on the mass of thorny branches in the smallest work, “1:47pm (undergrowth)” in a way that evokes the opening scene of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986).

“What time is it in your paintings?” - The warmth of their hue suggests sticky afternoon (confirmed to us by the shared title, “1:47pm”).

That question is one that the late Carol Rhodes posed to Drake in an art school tutorial, and it is clear that these words have dogged his work ever since. Drake is always aware of the mood that different qualities of light, different times of day and different weather conditions create. This mood becomes a context in which his figures and characters are suspended. They are pressed upon by the conditions in which they find themselves, reflecting the very human experience that we can be both fond of and extremely alienated by our environments at the same time. Life is always a mixture of these states. Wealth and luxury is haunted by the impoverished and downcast. Peace and contentment threatened by chaos. Glimmers of something like paradise while often being found on the wrong side of the fence. Like his figures, Drake is causing us to be suspended between the two.

Sam Drake, (born 1993, Brighton), is an artist based in Glasgow. He completed his MFA in Painting from The Rhode Island School of Design (2017- 2019) and BA (Hons) in Painting and Printmaking at the Glasgow School of Art (2012- 2016).

Selected solo exhibitions: ‘Who Wheezes at the Gate’, EDGE ART PROJECT, Turin, Italy, (2024)

Selected group exhibitions include: Cho! Cho Le!, Arusha Gallery, London, UK (2024), Opening, A_Place Gallery, Glasgow, UK, (2023), Sense of Place, Space Ten Gallery, Los Angeles, USA, (2023). RISD Graduate Painting Thesis Show, Monya Rowe Gallery, New York, NY, (2019), Crocodile Tears, Morgan Fine Arts Building, Brooklyn, NY, (2019), Fresh Faces, Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts, (2019), Expectations, Field Projects Gallery, New York, New York, (2018), LA Summer, Arusha Gallery, Edinburgh, (2018).

Awards include: W. Gordon Smith & Jay Gordonsmith Award (2024), RSA Latimer Award (2024), The RSA William Littlejohn Award (2019), Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant Award (2017 & 2018), The Professor Baruch Kirschenbaum Term Scholarship (2017-2019), RISD Fellowship (2017-2019), Walter Scott Purchase Prize (2017), RSA New Contemporaries Selected Artist (2016), Richard Ford Award (2014).

Collections include: Brown Arts Initiative Collection, Brown University, USA, Walter Scott Collection, Edinburgh.

Selected artist residencies include: Moosey Art Residency, Norwich, UK 2023, Oli Epp Studio Residency, The Koppel Project, London 2018.

1 - 15 November, 2024

Preview: 1 November, 6 - 9PM - all welcome

Opening hours: Tues & Thurs 11 - 2, Sun 2 - 4 & by appointment

A_Place, 209 Bath Street, Glasgow, G2 4HZ