Carolyn Drake “Knit Club”

Yancey Richardson Gallery

This event has ended.

Yancey Richardson presents Knit Club, an exhibition of photographs by American artist Carolyn Drake. In the project gallery, a selection of work from her series Isolation Therapy will be on view. Strikingly different in subject matter and approach, each series offers the viewer an alternate view of reality that deliberately blurs the line between what is real and imagined. This is the artist’s debut exhibition with the gallery.

The works on view in the main gallery are drawn from the series Knit Club, the result of a several-years-long collaboration with a group of women Drake met while living in Water Valley, Mississippi. Drake shies away from literal descriptions, and leans toward the surreal and mysterious to present a different perspective on southern femininity and motherhood. The viewer is encouraged to question preconceptions of what it means to be a “woman.” The male gaze is disavowed through the obscuring of subjects’ faces and bodies, allowing the women to reclaim the ability to craft their own stories. Influenced by the writer William Faulkner, the images are enigmatic, Gothic in style, and richly layered with a symbolism that resists interpretation. As with much of her earlier work, Drake’s subjects are also artists, integral to the construction of the photographs.