Movie art director and production designer Damien Drew is showing a series of images from his US road trip at Black Eye Gallery in June.
‘Everywhere was Wherever’, an exhibition of images captured in an 18-day motorcycle trip across the USA by movie art director Damien Drew, will be showing at the Black Eye Gallery in Sydney. In his first solo exhibition Drew’s images illustrate a unique perspective from the American road.
Like locations for a yet-to-be-made film, the lonely edifices he photographed sat incomplete and in some ways interchangeable. Evidenced in these images is a search for both personal and geographical identity. Drew’s images represent every intersection as presenting a choice, yet every destination feeling the same.
He says, “The road is a lonely place where almost everybody seems lost. It’s all the same place.” His images impel viewers to pay attention to scenes and details habitually passed over, presenting beauty in unlikely places. With the outward expansion and relentless franchising of roadside America there is a loss of place and texture.
Drew notes Howard Kunstler’s lament of America’s descent into ‘placelessness’ in ‘The Geography of Nowhere’. It is becoming a country transformed from vital places and communities to a land where every place is no place in particular. On the opening night of June 3, respected television and radio journalist, presenter and producer, Fenella Kernebone will be a guest speaker.
Drew is an art director and production designer whose feature film credits include The Great Gatsby, Superman Returns, Star Wars and The Matrix films. He studied architecture at UNSW and his passion for the creation of place and visual story telling is clear and concise.
The exhibition will run from June 2 to June 21 at Black Eye Gallery, 138 Darlinghurst Road, Darlinghurst, NSW, ph: (02) 8084 7541. Gallery hours are 10am to 6pm. For more information see blackeyegallery.com.au
Images of his US road trip make up the first solo stills exhibition by movie art director Damien Drew.
