City of Tells
City of Tells is a body of work composed of a drawing series and a split-screen video. The work incorporates depictions of animals, portraits of family, friends, and diverse historical and contemporary influences such as Dante, Delacroix, Murray Gell-Mann, Goya, Homer, La Malinche, Cormac McCarthy, Herman Melville, Michelangelo, Bruce Nauman and Diego Rivera. In gambling parlance, a “tell” is the subconscious broadcasting of one’s emotional, psychological, and intellectual make-up. A monumental scale drawing anchors the body of work, with a banquet table as the focal point of the scene. The Renaissance tableau inspired drawing addresses a collective Western history and the interconnectedness of animal and human life, with references to personal memory, biblical tales and cultural mythology.
“The drawing, is enormous, twelve feet high and thirty-two feet long. The figures are outsize; they invoke the epic scale of opera, an opera of personal and cultural memory that spans human history, an idealized community of Man. Thirty-nine figures fill the long plane of the picture. To the far left Drake has included himself as a child who watches the scene as the unfolding of all the possibilities of life. […] Drake’s figures bring their histories with them, but they move in a different direction than time’s arrow, whose chronological procession is replaced. Time is presented here as a jumble, a pool, neither forward or backward but all times at once: each hero of literature and art, each family and friend, each mythic figure’s trajectory in chronological time is thrown aside and substituted with a different condition entirely: the artist’s sense of elective affinity.”
–Between Animality and Man by Steven Henry Madoff
City of Tells (Katrina) began in 2002 as a 1:1 scale study for the monumental drawing, City of Tells, now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. In 2005 the study was slated for an exhibition at New Orleans Museum of Art, however, it was damaged during Hurricane Katrina, when the museum was flooded. After the work was conserved and returned to the studio new elements were added—a tidal wave spills into the first panel; a prone figure, as if swept on to the shore appears in the center foreground, with a black mesa in the distance, mirrored by other areas throughout the scene, which are also blackened with dense layers of charcoal. Over the course of twenty years the work evolved into a finished piece, completed in 2022. As in City of Tells, the epic scale and metaphorical content of City of Tells, Katrina embodies Leonardo da Vinci’s sentiment that the artist’s greatest challenge is to capture a person’s ‘moti mentali’ (motions of the mind).
City of Tells, 2002-2004, Video with original music composed by Pascal Dusapin, edition of 8, duration 30:35 (excerpt 5:20)
Exhibitions
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
February 28 – April 30, 2006
SITE Santa Fe
February 12 – May 01, 2005
Arthur Roger Gallery
October 2 – October 30, 2004
Moody Gallery
December 4 – December 31, 2004