Reptile Expo - Erin K. Drew

MFA Thesis Exhibition

Donna Beam Gallery

Gallery Hours: Monday - Friday 9am - 4pm

Reptile Expo is Drew’s contribution to the discourse on vice in Las Vegas. The exhibition indexes cultural fabrications around substance use and abuse, nightlife, and notions of freedom. It turns a skeptic’s eye to “sin” in the city while gleefully indulging in cliches and visual cues from the Vegas built environment and its associated media landscape. It lights upon the pervasive presence of alcohol within canonical art history and the constructions in its wake.

The show is anchored by a series of quilts sewn in a traditional motif called Drunkard’s Walk. The pattern has its roots in the Women’s Temperance Movement, and is designed to mock the drunk’s meandering path back home from the bar. In Reptile Expo, Drew follows this meandering path through notions of derangement and lucidity, adventure and domesticity, control and abandon. She audits the Judeo-Christian concept of vice from her vantage as academic party animal, ex-Catholic punk, feminist, artist and addict (who acknowledges that all identity constructions are fluid). She considers what it means to be under the influence. Drew places her evasive urges on display and circles them in lights.