How exactly does depression feel? What occupies one’s thoughts? How does one reconcile the demands and reality of daily life with the mind being in a constant emotional ebb and flow? In “A Self Portrait” emerging Bahamian artist, Drew Weech, aims to provide – through both painting and sculpture – a window into what it’s like to struggle with depression by presenting a body of work which vacillates between both the ephemeral and the perpetual aspects of the disorder.

Within a forestial sculpture, viewers will be surrounded by a selection of allegorical still-life paintings which chronicle and map out how we reconcile, find freedom, escape and/or find a way to thrive with modern day anxieties. Continuing to work through matters relating to Blackness, visibility and obscurity, Weech’s abstraction and his gaze teaches us to slow down as we work through problematic figures–how we think about bravery, male vulnerability and unexpected encounters–with the fleeting nature in life. We as viewers are left to contemplate and project our ideas and ideals about life, death, liminality and existentialism–all of the things that we experience–in a very personal way.

Biography

Drew Weech was born in Nassau, The Bahamas in 1984. After graduating from St. John’s College in 2001, he went on to receive a BDes in Interdisciplinary Design at NSCAD University. In the fall of 2011, he began exploring various themes within the history of art, such as the nude, ancient mythology and vanitas. Employing both abstract and figurative painting, each series Weech creates may at first seem vastly different from the other. However, using colour as a means to create the illusion of form in abstraction or painting ghostly, textured images on seemingly monochromatic canvases, each series is connected by the artist’s desire for his work to be revealed in a slow, deliberate manner.