James Drake

Feynman Diagrams unify the many works in James Drake’s seventeenth exhibition with the gallery, Drawing, Reading and Counting. In the artist’s renown, virtuosic style, contemporary scientific examinations and mathematical expressions are overlaid with classical imagery of birds, insects, nudes, as well as candid renderings of some of the artist’s transsexual friends from Juarez, Mexico. The works are executed in pencil, ink and charcoal, and cutouts and stencils reveal poetry, blocks of text and other notations. These recent works have been described as a kind of “self-portrait of the conscious and possibly subconscious ephemera circling through the artist’s mind.” They are also examinations of contemporary issues of social injustice, the history of art and human history.