Drea LaRose is an upstate New York based artist working in photography, digital painting, and sculpture. Her art has been shown locally in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Recently, she has exhibited two solo shows:, Mirror/Image at One River School in Clark, NJ and Exhibition 5 at Saratoga Arts in Saratoga, NY. Locally, she has exhibited locally at Ning Gallery in New York, NY, Ethan Cohen Gallery in New York, NY, The Albany Center Gallery, The University Art Museum in Albany, NY, the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy, and the Schweinfurth Arts Center in Auburn NY. She received her MFA from SUNY Albany in 2019 where she was awarded the Distinguished MFA Thesis Award and the Terri Cosma Boor and Judy Brust Emerging Artist Award. In January 2020 she opened an alternative exhibition space, The Hallway at Second Street Studios located in downtown Troy where she has curated exhibitions since the opening in 2020, both virtual and physical. LaRose currently teaches part time at the State University of New York at New Paltz. She is currently working and living in Troy, NY.
She founded and runs Second Street Studios and The Hallway at Second Street Studios, an alternative, artist-run exhibition space in Downtown Troy, NY.
I confront issues of visual shifts between the analog and digital worlds. By scanning identifiable and familiar physical materials that often refer to brick and mortar substances. I render them as digital representations—simulations—losing all tactility and identity. They’re further abstracted with photo editing software using computer-generated drop shadows, patterns, and gradients. Combining these “actual” and simulated layers complicates the often illusionist compositions, further disrupting the information and how it’s viewed. The tension of physical objectness and illusionistic representation is delicately balanced between these two states of being.
This interference of information, authorship, and originality mirrors our own interactions with images on the internet. I contemplate these shared visual experiences, by creating controlled moments of the constantly fluctuating visual world around me.