Join us First Friday May 5th 6-9pm

• Open Artist Studios
• Opening Reception for Vincent Drake’s gallery exhibition
• We will have something fun happening in the Relay Ridge Printshop too (details TBA).

Refreshments provided! Come celebrate local artists and their work!

Relay Ridge featured artist: Vincent Drake

Vincent Drake was chosen for this local Call for Exhibitions via democratic votes from a first-round 10-member panel of 2023 Penland Winter Resident Artists and then a final-round panel of the Relay Ridge Studio Artists.

“I’m inspired by the absurdity of modern American society; The irrational ideals we’re convinced to accept, the relentless marketing and propaganda, the tribalism, disgust, perverted romanticism and violence that has become characteristic of us. In my art I’m unconcerned with beauty or idealization. I’m interested in investigating our culture’s influence on our identities and the confusion, panic, and suffering that results. My subjects are people; sometimes we as individuals, sometimes us as a group. They are part mechanical construction, part hallucination; both comical and uncomfortable; suffering, confused, and trapped by their emptiness and proselytized ambitions.”

Bio Vincent Drake was born in 1976 in Udon Thani, Thailand to a Thai mother and American father and spent his formative years in a working class neighborhood in southeast Los Angeles. He attended the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and the San Francisco Art Institute where he studied Fine Art Painting. Drake’s art can be seen as an exploration of society’s struggle with the individual and our human nature. His work has been exhibited throughout the United State and Canada. He currently finds himself home in Knoxville, Tennessee.