ART
Drake Carr on Horny Art, Dive Bars, and Samuel R. Delany
The Brooklyn-based artist Drake Carr likes to dress sexy for the studio. It helps him get in the mood, but it also reflects the salaciousness of his work, in which colorful, larger-than-life characters hump and bump into one another, their cartoon-like faces throwing shade, or grinning in ecstasy. Inspired by his job bartending at Happyfun Hideaway, a New York institution best-described as the queer, Bushwick version of Cheers, Carr’s paintings, drawings, and sculptures play with juxtapositions of pleasure vs. pain, private vs. public, and godliness vs. sin. On the occasion of Service, Carr’s latest rainbow colored solo show now on view at Fierman and Situations, the artist caught up with Fierman gallery director and curator Tony Jackson to discuss his mushroom-fueled practice, and why Bananarama is better than rock n’ roll.
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TONY JACKSON: How are you, Drake?
DRAKE CARR: I’m good. How are you?
JACKSON: I’m good. I have COVID. I had a sore throat for a couple of days, whatever. What’s up? What did you do today?
CARR: I’m just working, painting. Trying to finish everything for the show.
JACKSON: Have you been listening to music?
CARR: Yeah. I’m either listening to Bananarama—‘80s and ‘90s dance music—or weird, ambient, voiceless music. I can’t listen to sad music and I can’t really do rock music right now.
JACKSON: That’s funny, Bananarama.
CARR: Yeah, it’s summer. The music needs to match the colors that I’m painting.
JACKSON: So you get up in the morning and it’s a studio day—what does the morning look like for you?
CARR: I wake up and brush my teeth. I wear something that’s sexy and the colors match. I’m dressing like someone I would want to paint.
JACKSON: That’s cool.
CARR: I bike to the studio. I get a coffee and then I get a sandwich from the deli or a plate from the Dominican place by my studio and then I paint in silence for a while. Lately, I will eat some mushrooms. It gives me energy and makes everything funny.
JACKSON: I can see it in the work now that you say it. It’s really colorful and the figures in the paintings look like people, obviously, but they’re distorted—especially the decals. Do you call them decals? Like, the stuff in the work that comes off the wall?
CARR: I call them cutouts.
JACKSON: Especially in those. The last one you made looks like a person but the color is saturated and there’s something else going on.
CARR: I think the one you’re talking about is a little bit elongated and exaggerated almost like an illustration as opposed to a painting. The shoulders are too broad and the legs are a little wobbly. I think things are starting to look a little psychedelic.
JACKSON: Would you say your work is an extension of yourself or an idealized version of yourself?
CARR: It depends. Sometimes there’s an idealized or exaggerated version of myself, like if I got sucked into Cool World or Who Framed Roger Rabbit. If I bartend late on a Friday at Happy Fun Hideaway and then go to the studio the next day I am just painting or drawing the people who were all up in my face the night before.
JACKSON: How long have you been bartending there?
CARR: Five years.
JACKSON: So you incorporate that into your work.
CARR: Yeah. It’s the brightest, loudest, most colorful, and most charged environment that I find myself in. I was having a moment while I was working on the show where every time I would draw a figure, they were always leaning on a bar. I started to feel a little self-conscious about that but it makes sense that the bar would be the setting because the most stimulating, intense environment that I constantly find myself in. It’s just so colorful and animated. The interactions are intense. They’re either very horny, a little scary, or a little depressing. It’s like extreme excitement and also dark darkness.
JACKSON: When the pandemic happened and there weren’t that many people in the bar what did your work look like?
CARR: There was a time where it was just fully closed and I wasn’t there at all. I think my stuff got hornier, just because of feeling sexually frustrated or unfulfilled. I was also trying to make some money so I was coming up with little things to sell like these hot guy trading cards I made. On top of that, I was illustrating Samuel Delany’s book.
JACKSON: I wanted to ask you about Samuel R. Delany. He’s written about his life and he has published science fiction novels. He’s a Black guy who doesn’t lean on his academic history, he likes to be in the mix. You illustrated his last book Big Joe, did you know about Sam Delany before that happened?
CARR: I didn’t actually know who he was before we worked together. But Impatient Press, the publisher of the book I illustrated for him, reached out to me. When I read the rough draft I was very inspired and disgusted by it. It’s, like, so gross and also so hot. Working with him was cool. I feel lucky that I was able to do that. It’s such a racialized book and it’s always interesting to illustrate work that’s written from someone else’s point of view. To try to create visuals for such an intense story that’s overtly sexual and has a lot of race play—it was a good challenge.
JACKSON: You also worked with Christopher John Rogers. That was 2018, right?
CARR: Yeah, that was really fun. I love working with Chris. Before that I had a solo show at The Hole where I made this sculpture called “Joseph Emerging From The Well” based on the story from the Bible where Joseph has a coat of many colors and his brothers rip it off of him and throw him in a well. We collaborated and he made an insanely beautiful giant coat that’s super colorful and over the top for the sculpture. The next year I made work for him. I painted on four different garments and then I made a print that he used for a shirt. He’s very inspiring. I want to collaborate with him again.
JACKSON: I love him. So you were saying that the work you did for Samuel Delany was really sexually charged. The recent paintings you’ve been doing, they’re not super sexual but some of the stuff that you had at Secret Project Robot, your last show in June, was. How do you know if you want to make something really sexual?
CARR: I think to some degree I plan that out and to some degree it’s what I’m naturally inclined to do. I get commissions to illustrate things that are intentionally very explicit. Even though the work might be overtly sexual or really horny, I’m still a polite person. I’m not making things in order to offend or make someone feel crazy or freaked out. I’m not trying to be aggressive with the things that I make. I think there’s something to be said for these super horny images to be handheld and a little bit more personal and private. For example, I don’t know that I would want a giant painting of a guy jerking off in my house. What if my mom comes over or something? It’s just a little bit too much.
JACKSON: Yeah.
CARR: I did make larger than life cutout paintings for Happy Fun that with erect cocks and tits out and stuff, but those are meant to exist in a dive bar that already has a lot of questionable behavior. I guess it’s about the context of where this thing is going to live—and how I want to make someone feel. At the dive bar I think it’s exciting to have horny imagery, I want to manifest that behavior from people. But with a big fancy painting that’s going to be in a gallery or something—I don’t know, I might change my mind on this, but right now, I want it to be a little bit more palatable.
JACKSON: What do you want to be doing in the future?
CARR: I’d like to not have to bartend. [Laughs] Five years from now I would like to be able to make my stupid little art and be able to live off of that.
JACKSON: The name of the show is Service. How did you come up with it?
CARR: Working at bars and restaurants affects the way you interact with people. You just learn certain things about communicating and how you treat others. And you feel this bond with people who also work in the service industry. I also thought of church service, which was a big part of my life as a kid. I don’t know how much of an intentional religious theme is in the show but it’s still there, because it’s a part of me. So it has multiple meanings. I feel lucky that it’s with you. It’s always better to work with friends.
JACKSON: I totally agree. You have to put your friends into shit or you’re just going to be naked and out there alone. That’s no fun.