Galleri Urbane is pleased to announce Elemental Form, a solo exhibition of the latest works by New York based artist Jessica Drenk. This represents the artist’s seventh solo exhibition at the gallery. Exhibition on view: September 6 - October 25, 2025
They look like agates, banded bullseyes whose whorls take shape over millenia. Or geodes broken open to reveal their crystal-filled interiors. Or then again they resemble sinuous riverbeds seen from aerial perspectives. Jessica Drenk’s junk-mail sculptures, the pieces in Elemental Form, juxtapose slow time—the gait of erosion, counted in eons—with quotidian rhythms measured by the arrival of the mail, the psychic and temporal weightlessness of sales and deals. Ephemera versus eternity.
Building in layers, Drenk renders erosion, sedimentation and crystallization human-made. Arguably, our Anthropocene moment gives meaning to the reversal her labor provokes, an anomaly at a time when humans and the natural world often seem irreparably at odds. But verisimilitude is clearly not Drenk’s goal: not mimesis but transformation. “The poles of the earth have wandered. The equator has apparently moved,” John McPhee writes in Annals of the Former World, his Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction tome about NorthAmerican geology. The fixity of latitude and our agreed-upon compass points are not set in stone, it would seem, although we look to them to orient ourselves. Drenk’s new work highlights this ambiguity: fluidity rather than fixity emanates from her pieces.
This ambiguity—this being in “the state of flow”—lies at the heart of Drenk’s practice. Her works are rebellious: what seems—and is—solid is also constantly shapeshifting. And so we wonder. What does it mean to be set in stone? Might a kind of alchemy change how we perceive form or matter or fixity? It is our sense of time that wobbles and with it our understanding of the life cycle of objects through time. Could they mean more than we believe? Could they suggest, in fact, their opposite? Exactly, yes, Drenk seems to say: what if they could?