Drew Austin
Exhibition Overview
“The queer experience is all about alchemy. Turning the most painful things into the most beautiful: prison into poetry, funerals into parades, and plagues into revolutions.” -Leo Herrera
Centering a process-based approach, this body of work unfolds as an exploration of self through the act of making. Rooted in overlapping languages of interiority, queer aesthetics, domestic ritual, memory, and intuitive material response, the work privileges inquiry over conclusion. Meaning emerges not through singular objects, but through layering, repetition, and proximity.
Using repeating motifs derived from fleeting shadows, the works function as records of response rather than declarations of certainty. Repetition becomes a means of understanding—forms shifting across surfaces and scales in ways that mirror the construction of identity itself: assembled through intuition, performance, concealment, longing, and return.
The works oscillate between two material and emotional registers. Some pieces exist in a quieter frequency: darkened surfaces, softened edges, moments of pause that evoke lamplight, solitude, reflection, the intimate grounding of domestic space, or the flutter of possibility in public queer space. Others move outward with a heightened visibility, embracing ornament, saturation, permeability, and excess. Together, these registers remain in constant conversation, not as opposites, but as parallel conditions housed within the same body. The tension between subtlety and spectacle, concealment and revelation, becomes a structural language within the work itself.
Collected objects, reused materials, gifted remnants, and recurring forms accumulate into an evolving archive of lived experience–holding memory, touch, time, and previous lives within them. The physical labor of making functions as a form of processing—a way of tracing the movement between memory and presence, desire and acceptance, fragmentation and wholeness. Within this framework, home emerges not as fixed location, but as an accumulative condition built from ritual, sensation, familiarity, and chosen grounding; a material record of someone learning to more fully inhabit their own interior world through the act of making.
The community garden on view, created by the ArtLab interns, centers collaboration and collective ownership. A shared vision of flourishing plants fills the corner of the gallery and boldly confronts the outside world, asking viewers to greet the installation from the exterior of the gallery, viewable from multiple directions and throughout different times of the day. The plants hold their own agency, collecting color from installed lights, refracting light on surrounding surfaces, and reflecting the viewer upon closer inspection.
About Drew Austin
Drew Austin (b.1996) is an interdisciplinary artist and curator living and working in Denver, CO. He grew up in Great Falls, Montana, and attended the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, in Denver, which he graduated from in 2017 with his BFA as Valedictorian.
Austin is the Program Manager for The Wayfaring Band, an organization that creates inclusive experiences that amplify the lives of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, cultivate connections, and transform perspectives to alter the way people view disability. He previously worked as the Curator of Visual Arts at The Dairy Arts Center, Exhibitions Curator for ReCreative Denver, as well as put together independent curatorial projects in spaces such as Redline Denver, The Temple Artist Studios, The Digital Armory, and Alto Gallery.
Portrayed primarily through drawing, sculpture, and light-based installation, Austin’s work functions as a conduit for understanding and comprehension of everyday things—mundane situations, domestic space, slow growth, and light—both large and small in a human-dominated world.
https://www.studiodrewaustin.com/
Residency Period: 3/4/2026 - 5/15/2026
Exhibition Opening: 5/15/2026
Exhibition Dates: 5/15/2026 - 6/12/2026
