Exhibition on view: September 6 - OCTOBER 25, 2025
Galleri Urbane is pleased to announce Elemental Form, a solo exhibition of the latest works by New York based artist Jessica Drenk. This represents the artist’s seventh solo exhibition at the gallery.
Meet the artist September 6th from 5:00 - 7:00pm
They look like agates, banded bullseyes whose whorls take shape over millenia. Or geodes broken open to reveal their crystal-filled interiors. Or then again they resemble sinuous riverbeds seen from aerial perspectives. Jessica Drenk’s junk-mail sculptures, the pieces in Elemental Form, juxtapose slow time—the gait of erosion, counted in eons—with quotidian rhythms measured by the arrival of the mail, the psychic and temporal weightlessness of sales and deals. Ephemera versus eternity.
“My work is an inquiry into materiality: what makes up the objects that surround us as well as the composition of the natural world. I am interested in how parts combine to create a whole and the intricacies of shape and texture found in the world on every scale. In treating everyday objects as raw material to sculpt, I practice a form of conceptual alchemy: through physically manipulating these objects their meanings become transmuted. Each piece is a direct response to material—a subversion of the meanings associated with it, and a reference to the life cycle of objects through time.”
Exhibition Install Photos:
Building in layers, Drenk renders erosion, sedimentation and crystallization human-made. Arguably, our Anthropocene moment gives meaning to the reversal her labor provokes, an anomaly at a time when humans and the natural world often seem irreparably at odds. But verisimilitude is clearly not Drenk’s goal: not mimesis but transformation. “The poles of the earth have wandered. The equator has apparently moved,” John McPhee writes in Annals of the Former World, his Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction tome about NorthAmerican geology. The fixity of latitude and our agreed-upon compass points are not set in stone, it would seem, although we look to them to orient ourselves. Drenk’s new work highlights this ambiguity: fluidity rather than fixity emanates from her pieces.
Watch:
Jessica checks in from her New York studio to answer some questions about Elemental Form
This ambiguity—this being in “the state of flow”—lies at the heart of Drenk’s practice. Her works are rebellious: what seems—and is—solid is also constantly shapeshifting. And so we wonder. What does it mean to be set in stone? Might a kind of alchemy change how we perceive form or matter or fixity? It is our sense of time that wobbles and with it our understanding of the life cycle of objects through time. Could they mean more than we believe? Could they suggest, in fact, their opposite? Exactly, yes, Drenk seems to say: what if they could?
Aggregate Triptych – 44 x 88”
Jessica Drenk is an American artist raised in Montana, where she developed an appreciation for the natural world that remains an important inspiration to her artwork today. Tactile and textural, her sculptures highlight the chaos and beauty that can be found in simple materials.
Drenk’s work can be found in private collections throughout the world, as well as institutional collections including the Yale University Art Gallery and the Huntington Museum of Art. Corporate collections include Wells Fargo, Fidelity Investments, The Macallan distillery in Scotland, and the Montage Big Sky Resort. Drenk has been the recipient of several awards, including International Sculpture Center’s Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, and her work has been pictured in Sculpture and Interior Design magazines, as well as The Workshop Guide to Ceramics.
Drenk received an MFA in 3D Art from the University of Arizona in 2007 and a bachelor’s degree from Pomona College in 2002. A working artist since 2007, Drenk’s home and studio are currently outside Rochester, New York.