Drifters | Craig Deppen Auge

Craig Deppen Auge (Kansas City, MO) | Exchange (Kansas City) | August 2021

This series of 20 sculptures and interventions incorporating textile scraps, collage, metal grid form, and other various collection materials can be viewed as For the most part, the artist has committed to using scraps and parts “as found” with no additional manipulation, just a focus on composition, constructed intuitively. This series of works is the most closely connected to the artist’s current body of work outside of the museum. Within this setting, these are abstract poems honoring all who have drifted, and will drift, through Elsewhere; from previous residents all the way back to the boarding house days. In that broader sense, these may speak to our independent, yet collective, journey through this life, on this planet, and the “getting lost” elsewhere along the way. Other questions emerge, as the artist continues to think about the grid as the symbol of existing social structures, or more broadly, and the fabric as ourselves and how we navigate these systems. Then we can ask: are we dancing with the grid or fighting the grid? Are we caught in the grid or escaping the grid? The placement of these pieces and proximity to each other also begins to suggest they carry individual personalities, and are themselves transient beings, resting mostly in the Alone Zone and drifting down the hallway.