Towards the Pandemonium of the Sun

The Birds of Paquime, 2007, Charcoal and tape on paper mounted on canvas, 95 x 72 in.

Water for Malinalxochitl, 2007, Mixed media on paper, 96 x 82 in.

The Sparrow's Eye, 2008, Mixed media on paper, 98 x 72 in.

Milagros for Water, 2007, Mixed media on paper, 92 x 72 in.

When the Swan is in the Sky, 2009, Charcoal, mixed media on paper, 102 x 78 in

The Rain of Huitzilopochtli, 2007, Mixed media on paper, 92 x 72 in

James Drake’s artistic practice is shaped by a sense of epic and cyclical history—an approach that invites an interpretation of his work in relation to myth and archetype. That is, his is a project that dehistoricizes the human experience in a way that is related to comparative mythology scholars’ abstractions of the similarities of certain narratives and protagonists across time and culture. What arises in Drake’s work is a tension between the historically specific and contingent moment that inspired the act of artistic creation and the tendency to universalize a continuum of unchanged human experience—that is, to transform the individual into the mythological.

–“Salon of a Thousand Souls: Archetypes and Archives” by Laura Addison