FOR 11/2

MARIAN DREW ‘EVERY LIVING THING’ ON VIEW AT HOUS PROJECTS

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NEW YORK City — Hous Projects announces a solo exhibition of acclaimed Australian photographer Marian Drew’s series, “Every Living Thing,” view through December 8.

Road kill is an accepted daily nuisance of Australian drivers and commercial developers. Cadavers of wombats, possums, marsupials, Tasmanian swamp hens and rosellas wounded by traffic, power lines, and construction litter curbsides waiting to be mulched back to the earth. The common link in each of their tiny lives is death by man. Marian Drew gathers their corpses from byways and highways and places them in opulent tableaus to demonstrate how man affects nature when he begins building and consuming in the name of progress.

Drew sets her deceased on kitchen tables amid fruit and fauna in a manner that evokes Renaissance still life painting. In particular. Reference and parallels are found in the vanitas genre, which were constructions by painters to warn of the bouquet of hubris man weaves.

Drew ushers in a slow awakening because her scenes initially are more feast table than allegorical depictions of human destruction. The perfection and temporality Drew creates, like Renaissance painters, is a tad too shiny and contrived for the viewer to deny that the constructions are meant to evoke awareness to issue as well as process.

The contrast is startling in its delicacy and beauty. What should be a comfortable table of indulgence and conversation is fouled up with the stench of just those intentions’ affect on the world outside kitchens and dining rooms.

No matter how decorative the setting, the brutality of death is retained. Drew’s uses of the resplendent table as a symbol of wealth and commerce is drastically altered when tables are literally turned and morph into displays of waste and sacrifice left in the wake of human consumption.

The gallery is at 31 Howard Street. For information, www.housprojects.com or 212-941-5801.