NYAB Event - James A. Drosnes "Iconograffiti"

James A. Drosnes "Iconograffiti"

Krause Gallery

This event has ended.

KRAUSE GALLERY presents emerging artist James A. Drosnes’ first exhibition at Krause Gallery in New York.

Prior to a successful career in film that included writing for the studio DreamWorks, and writing and directing a film that premiered at Sundance Film Festival, Drosnes worked in the theater for over a decade, creating conceptual art pieces for the stage. Subsequently, he was recruited into advertising where he’s written and/or creative directed work for a host of multi-billion dollar brands and Fortune 500 companies. Having worked across such a range of fields of creative expression, his transition to fine art was just a matter of time.

In his latest body of work, “Iconograffiti,” Drosnes sets his sights on iconic photographs. In his view, editorial imagery that becomes iconic does so initially when a picture powerfully captures the essence of a broader cultural narrative, summing up an entire event in a single frame. Ironically, he feels, the more powerful the photo, the more it becomes, over time, detached from that narrative. The event it summarized is replaced in the collective memory by the image itself. Drosnes believes this to be unfortunate, seeing the past as providing messages and asking questions about the present.

In order to unlock those messages and provoke those questions, Drosnes has to first force viewers out of the trance state they enter into when they see an image for the millionth time. Seeing the same image over and over becomes the visual equivalent of white noise. That trance state is what causes people to recall the image but not the event, he believes. Drosnes reimagines the picture, keeping enough of the original for it to be familiar, but presenting it in a way it’s never been seen before. His objective is to compel the viewer to rethink the image, and consider its meaning above and beyond its content.