No one ever told me grief felt so much like fear. - C.S. Lewis Renaissance still-life painting featured opulent tables of fruit and fauna taken from the land for human pleasure and consumption, but beneath the sensual images was an allegory that Marian Drew assimilates to contemporary society. Rather than bucolic examples of a landowner's fortunes or flexed exertions of man's control over the natural world, Drew's tables are dressed to implicate the disregard humanity has for the wild animal and demonstrates the collateral damage of the clash between nature and culture in the name of advancement. Rifting on the conceptions of the vanitas genre, Drew warns in her compositions of the bouquet of senseless hubris man weaves with fresh subtextual notions that are all the more poignant as ecological issues threaten our world. Drew ushers in a slow awakening as sensation yields from the first blush of awe at her painterly, bedazzling compositions to pallor as the realization congeals that these are lifeless animals perched against fussy, starched tablecloths and pattern dinnerware. The warmth of the feast table is tainted when barriers are removed between the beasts and us. The perfection and temporality Drew creates is a tad too shiny and contrived for the viewer to deny that the constructions are meant to evoke awareness to issues as well as artistic process. Moreover, in producing her work, Drew initiates a new vernacular that displaces traditional conceptions of still-life composition. Firstly, she translates the medium from painting to contemporary photography. The leap is breezy because the mechanical rendering of inanimate objects is easily simulated in a photograph. The second adaptation is switching out location. Classic European paintings contextualized the comfortable source of Western indulgence and splendor, but that notion is taken topsy turvy when the tableaus become the rugged, strange landscapes of Australia. Hand in hand with this alteration is the replacement of subject matter from hunted fish and game or domesticated animals with wildlife whose demise was unnatural. Sport can be cruel, but careless disregard is unforgivable. Via these distillations, Drew aims to reveal a modern relationship between the cohabitation of urban life and the animal kingdom. The contrasts in her work are startling in their delicacy and beauty; fascinating in depth and sensation. Drew's endeavor is successful because the resplendent table as a symbol of wealth and commerce is drastically altered when tables are literally turned and morph into displays of waste and sacrifice left in the wake of human progress. For this series, Drew ushers in a print size exclusively for hous projects that is 11 x 14 inches, which facilitates collecting her work as well as brings the viewer in for an even closer examination of her ruminations. Moreover, her standard print sizes of 35.43 x 43.3 and 43.68 x 52.26 inches are available from hous projects. Please inquire directly to the gallery for pricing and availability. Marian Drew is a native Australian and has done post-graduate study in Germany as well as received the DAAD Scholarship. Drew has exhibited extensively and in particular at: Queensland Center for Photography, Australian Center for Contemporary Art, Brisbane City Art Gallery, Kassell University Art Gallery, Insitute of Art in Brisbane, and Neue Gallery Kassell among others. Moreover, a monograph of her work has been published in association with the Queensland Center of Photography entitled Marian Drew: photographs + video. Her work is held in the permanent collections of: National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of South Australia, Queensland Art Gallery, The Daryl Hewson Collection, and Artbank Sydney.