Drop City Gallery Inaugural Exhibition: A Ben Waterman Project: Reckoning of Mile

It all started with a 1,600 square foot shop space that became available in the lower level of the Glenn Richards building. Erika Fairman, Emma Shultz and Kate Sugaski who work at Glenn Richards and Honeychurch Antiques decided to turn it into an art space. They eagerly describe Drop City Gallery as a study space, for art, invention, dialogue and thought.

Fairman, Shultz and Sugaski will be curating group and solo exhibitions in a multitude of mediums with an emphasis on site specific exploration. Drop City plans on showing six exhibits a year, each running for approximately two months, giving plenty of time for people to come and see an exhibit more than once.

For more information, visit the gallery’s website at: www.dropcitygallery.com.

I’d seen pictures anticipating what I was about to experience at the gallery in South Lake Union, but pixels simply can’t capture the effect of the installation. As described on the gallery’s website, “The exhibit consists of 16,180 ceramic rail spikes, representing the average number of railroad spikes in one mile. Each spike is hand formed and fired using wood and soda ash techniques. Waterman's intensive two-year study of form and process mimics the tangible attributes of the spikes, while the sheer number of them creates a slow manipulation and distortion of form through process.”

Upon entering the space, I am greeted by a skinny, hovering platform covered with thousands of ceramic railroad spikes, which lead into a whitewashed room with exposed pipes. At the end of the platform lay an enormous pile of Waterman’s spikes. I could almost feel the sweat of the railroad workers creeping against my skin. In the guest book, one visitor said something to the effect of: ‘This piece makes you so still when the work is so obviously about motion.’

Each of Waterman’s hand -molded spikes is slightly distinct in its own way, each marked with the artist hand, a tool or the particular way it was fired. For Waterman, the project reflects “our cultural obsession with absence ... objects, individuals, the landscape polished into an immediately comprehensible and dismissive form ….”

Drop City’s next exhibition, Take a Seat, will feature chairs by fifteen artist, architects and craftsman. Each one-of-a kind chair will be built from salvaged and/or recycled materials. Take a Seat opens Friday, February 15th and runs through Saturday, March 29th.