Brown Foundation Gallery
November 20, 2021 – February 13, 2022
ArtWalk Reception
Saturday, November 27, 2021
6 – 9 PM
This exhibition is supported in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and Texas Commission on the Arts.
Rebecca Drolen
Unstable Entity
Rebecca Drolen’s exhibition, Unstable Entity, uses photographs and architectural constructs to explore balancing and tipping points within culturally unstable expectations of female strength, resilience, and bodily performance. The work compares physical bodily forms to ad-hoc assemblages that are tenuously balanced using common building materials. Within this juxtaposition is a meditation on the body as an architectural construct and the unsettled standards of what it means to be a “strong woman.” Drolen incorporates images of female body builders into the work as a form of archetype or idealized body, representing a maximized performance of strength and physicality. Navigating her own role as both subject and photographer, Drolen enters the photo frame pursuing performances of stamina, wavering balance, and labor. The resulting collage of forms speculates on the relationship of female strength to intimidation, sexuality, and desire and the individual stamina required to pursue both mental and physical wellness.
Rebecca Drolen (b. 1983) is an artist, educator, and independent curator working in Arkansas. Her photographs are concerned with how individuals visually assemble their identity and the constructed ideals placed on gendered bodily performance. Her work explores the breadth of how photographs can take form in contemporary art as it incorporates built spaces, assemblage and performance.
Drolen’s work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions on a national and international level, within noteworthy venues such as the Huffington Post, Oxford American’s “Eyes on the South,” the Light Factory, the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Texas Tech University, The Oklahoma State Museum of Art, the CICA Museum in Gimpo, Korea, and the Theory of Clouds Gallery in Kobe, Japan. Drolen has had work published in various art books, magazines, and blogs and has photographs held in private collections as well as the permanent collection at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana.
