Elise Drake (American, born 1993) is a sculptor, textile, and mixed media artist based in Brooklyn, NY, and Nashville, TN. Drake's work centers around technology's emotional and existential impact, questioning what it means to be human in a digital culture that uses vanity as an instrument of an obscure panopticon.

In 2020, Drake was an Artist in Residence at the Vermont Studio Center (VSC) 2020 and received a Certificate of Distinction from Paulina Pobocha, Curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In 2018, she was awarded Best in Show by the Maryland Federation of Art, and in 2016 she was a Finalist in the Wearable Art Awards of Holland (Alkmaar, Netherlands).

Drake has recently appeared in solo shows, WithYOU/WithME, Art von Frei (Berlin, Germany), L00K@YA!, Elephant Gallery (Nashville, TN), Viewfinder, Julia Martin Gallery (Nashville, TN), at the UCL Slade School of Fine Art (London, England), and in group shows: Shag: Provocative Textiles, curated by Laura Hutson Hunter (Nashville, TN), Unraveled, The Untitled Space (Tribeca, NYC), String Theories, Field Projects (NYC), the Endless Editions Biennial (NYC), Peach Pie, Goodyear Arts (Charlotte, NC), and QMart, Maestri Gallery (Dallas, TX).

Drake received a Certificate in Digital Fabrication from The Cooper Union in 2017. She graduated with her BFA in Sculpture with a Sustainability and Social Change concentration from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in 2015. In 2020, Drake was the Exhibition Designer for Radical Thoughts at the Museum of Contemporary Art Nashville (MOCAN).

Elise Drake is the co-founder of the experiential design agency JAWBRKR.

www.elisedrake.com
@elisedrake
www.jawbrkr.com
@jawbrkr

Human's earliest social technology is the desire to communicate through images, beads, and language. A long history of adornment with written language as signifier identification has become mass-produced and commodified due to the invention of plastics in the early 1900s. Elise Drake's newest series creates authenticity, authority, and autonomy by physically enlarging childhood craft motifs and replacing writings of innocent naivety with philosophical theories. Drake is amplifying whispers as a form of collective worth and graceful understanding.

She sculpts forms of text in clay, creating bas-reliefs that magnify the gathering of individual contemplations, providing a statement of overlapped viewpoints. By merging the historical context of written language and the process of relief sculptures, Drake experiments with the craft of casting in multiple materials, including colored plasters, gypsum cement, natural materials, and transparent resins backlit with digital media. Each chosen material speaks further to the 'collective contemplations' written messages conveyed.