Community Shapes

works by Drew DiPasquale 

 November 28 - December 24 | Reception / Meet the artist: Friday, December 1 / 5-8pm

The space we take up and live alongside transforms who we are as people. These spaces shape us, just as much as we shape them. A building’s existence can inspire poetry, provide shelter, create space for love, or even support industry. A building can also create feelings of isolation or even point out injustice, cruelty, and inequality. When a structure sits in juxtaposition with others, it creates a community of ideas and ideals. In some ways, buildings themselves create their own society. With a society of shapes and colors, there comes a complex system of dialogue. Through this dialogue, these inanimate objects take on lives of their own. And because they are alive in many ways, I believe, they create their own stories and conversations. My current work focuses on an interpretative process to understand these conversations and stories.

Drew is a lover and observer of both the natural and man-made worlds. He takes inspiration from his environment and tries to understand and interpret the conversations happening between things and systems. Drew is a mostly self-taught artist living and working in Portsmouth and has worked hard to find the right teachers, mentors, and community to fuel his growth. His artistic journey includes study at the Eliot School in Boston, Portsmouth Music and Art Center, and various other random discoveries of learning. Through his non-traditional journey, he's created an artistic awakening in himself to keep searching and improving on ways to communicate in this increasingly noisy world.