About

Drew Eastwood (b. Michigan, USA) is an artist, educator, independent curator and writer that resides in Portland, Maine. They attended Saginaw Valley State University where they earned a Bachelors of Arts degree with a minor in graphic design and graduated from Maine College of Art & Design where they obtained their Masters of Fine Arts degree in Studio Arts and is where they are currently offering their educational services. 

Approaching collage as a conceptual framework and a physical process, I seek to re-construct a new cultural identity, one that envisions a future both acknowledging, yet resisting, archaic gender preconceptions. Printed matter and photographic images are unified into zany characters who are aware of something awry, but recognize that such eccentricity is what makes them human. The harlequin characters show that collage is simply one broken-down fragment that bears no relation to another which reveals how hodge-podged our world is. 

As life offers up confusing mixtures of vastly different experiences, collage provides me with the ability to redefine what it means to exist; as I cut, instinctively analyzing imagery, my work becomes the marginalia constructed from the pages that depict a mythic view of gender. In re-imagining these images my harlequin figures hold the power to interrogate the cultural groupthink behind the Western gender binary.

Eastwood continues to exhibit regionally, most notably in the MFA Thesis Exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, ME; 49 Oak, Portland, ME; Gallery263, Cambridge, MA; NOTCH8 Gallery, Portland, ME; the UAG, Saginaw, MI. Eastwood’s work has been internationally published twice in ArtIt Magazine's Voice of Artists publication series (Issue 12 - Portrait & Figure and Issue 16 - 100 Artists Bringing Figures to Life). They also co-direct a contemporary apartment art gallery, Easthaus, with their partner, cat, frog, two spiders, and isopods.