Laurence Dreiband Being Contact
Laurence Dreiband was born in Manhattan, New York and lives in Los Angeles, California. He received his MFA from Art Center College of Design. Photography informed Dreiband’s earliest paintings and drawings, and his photographic practice is informed by the vocabulary of painting. He has had eight solo exhibitions and his work was subsequently exhibited in galleries and museums in America, Europe and Asia. Laurence Dreiband is Fine Art Department Chair Emeritus Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. As the founding chair, a position he held through 2012, Dreiband hired a distinguished art faculty and created a notable fine art program in this long established applied art & design school. An early interest in architecture and landscape culminated in Dreiband’s design and construction of Morning Light, his home/studio/garden, from 2000 to 2003, and which was selected in 2013 by Trends Architecture editors as one of Trends Top 50 American Homes. He is married to Claudine Escudier Dreiband and has one daughter, Eliot Rose.
Laurence Dreiband is drawn to the gutter - the darkness and jumble stewing in the amber muck of a street puddle - offers an aesthetic richness that serves as a catalyst for thought. His recent pigment prints gravitate toward the absent, the non-event and the overlooked – discovering something in nothing. Adjacent imagery disrupts narrative in order to explore the shifting nature of aesthetic experience. The work is assembled into seven related groupings: Natural Selection, Light Reading, Journeys Elsewhere, Lowlife, Art School, Puddles & Muddles and Distillation of Desire. Together they cultivate dubious contexts - presence and absence – the peripheral or out-of-focus alongside the explicit and awry – to muse on fluctuating cultural sensibilities, our fine art inheritance and the vagaries of distant memory. The pairs, bracketed by abstract bars of color, spark a visual conversation that considers aesthetic judgment, and what it means when two seemingly unrelated subjects are joined together. The project asks - what works with what, and why? It engages in a limitless visual debate, nourishing the mind, provoking possible meanings.
Light Reading Art School Puddles & Muddles Lowlife Journeys Elsewhere Natural Selection Distillation of Desire
