California BANDIT. A solo show by Craig Drennen

About

California BANDIT is Craig Drennen’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.  The exhibition includes painting, sculpture, video, and photography devoted entirely to the character of Bandit from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens.  Since 2008 Drennen has organized his studio practice around Timon of Athens, one of Shakespeare’s most problematic works and the only one of his plays not performed in his lifetime. For each character in the play Drennen produces a distinct body of work, resulting in a collection of related pieces composed of separately considered parts all arising from a weak link in the Western canon. 

Drennen began work for the Bandit character in late 2016. The Bandit pieces use a variety of recurring secular signifiers of Santa, so that associations with theft blend into the mythic patriarchal giver. For this exhibition, the imagery is condensed to include candy canes and chimney holes.  Versions of the Bandit works have been shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia in Atlanta; Cloaca Projects in San Francisco, CA; Atlanta Contemporary in Atlanta, GA; and Unrequited Leisure in Nashville, TN.  California BANDIT at Los Angeles Valley College will likely be the final Bandit exhibition, as Drennen prepares for the next character.

About the artist:

Craig Drennen is based in Atlanta, GA and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow.  His work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, and The New York Times.  He has been a resident artist at Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture.  He teaches at Georgia State University, served as dean of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and writes for Art Pulse magazine. 
www.craigdrennen.com