Greg Drasler
A native of Waukegan, IL, Greg Drasler received his BFA and MFA from the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana. He began exhibiting upon moving to New York in the mid-1980s. Drasler’s work can be seen in the collections of Dow Jones, Inc.; Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL; University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana, IL; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY: and Thurston Twigg-Smith, Honolulu, HI.
Drasler has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in 1991 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1993. Currently he is an Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute and has also taught at Princeton University.
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The result manifests in “Stratocaster Suite,” a series of six luminous 70 x 400 inch oil-painted panels Drasler created for the show. Stretching across the length of a room, “Stratocaster Suite” is an ode to the open road.
Drasler is fond of metaphors. For instance, he once noted in an interview, “I think about the car as a camera, and painting as a vehicle.” But a vehicle for what? In a conversation, condensed and lightly edited below, Drasler expanded on this metaphor and other symbols contained within his work.
Entering the Castle Gallery at the College of New Rochelle, visitors encounter an arrangement of cherry blossoms in a glass vase. At least that’s what it appears to be. Closer observation reveals that the branch holding the flowers is actually a segment of plumbing pipe and that each delicate bud is a tiny pink toilet made of urethane foam.
