Home Artists About Curators Contact

The 5th annual DRIFT is scheduled for November 8-10, 2007 at Rush Arts Gallery in Chelsea, New York City. Opening reception is Friday November 9th, 6:00pm-8:00pm with live performances by Geoffrey Hendricks, Wayne Hodge, Tattfoo Tan, Danielle Abrams and Michael Maxwell. The three-day show will also feature twelve video artists from around the world. DRIFT 2007 is co-curated by Bradley Pecore and Eileen Olivieri Torpey from Santa Fe, New Mexico/New York City. DRIFT is an annual group exhibition that moves to a new location every year. The exhibition characterizes the impermanence and site-specificity of the artworks as well as the adaptive qualities of the participating artists. DRIFT highlights under represented talented artists while emphasizing the critical role of experimentation and process within conventional and unconventional exhibition spaces. DRIFT was first conceived in the winter of 2002 as a one-day exhibition on the Jersey Shore. The Atlantic Ocean inspired temporary works by twelve artists from the greater New York City area. Fluxus artist, Geoffrey Hendricks, punctuated the day with a famous headstand on a pile of ocean boulders. In 2003 the show moved to a former home of Buckminster Fuller, River Run Farm in New Jersey. Artists responded to thirty acres of pastoral/river landscapes and the cultural history of the farm, which was part of the Underground Railroad in the early 1800's. In 2004 DRIFT took place at Valentino Pier Park, located on the Buttermilk Channel in Red Hook Brooklyn. The exhibition featured 20 artists working in video, painting, sculpture, installation and sound. Red Hook was one of the first areas in Brooklyn to be inhabited by Algonquian tribes and later settled by the Dutch. The surrounding landscape was named for its red clay soil and hook shaped peninsula. Today, the view from Valentino Pier includes: The Statue of Liberty, The Verrazano Bridge, and Lower Manhattan. DRIFT 2006 took place at the Bronx River Art Center in the South Central Bronx and included 28 artists working in sculpture, installation, video and performance. Part of the exhibition existed outdoors along the Bronx River for one-day while the other part of the show stayed up for six weeks in the center's gallery. The river covers 23 miles and runs through the Bronx and Southern Westchester. The Mohicans were the first people to live and fish along the river and named it Aquehung or "River of High Bluffs." Beginning in the 1700's, twelve mills were built on the river and by the end of the 1800's, the river was so polluted from industrial waste that people called it an open sewage. Today, school groups and community organizations are working hard to ecologically restore the river and have made substantial progress– there are now a growing number of fish and plant species that have returned.