Working with photography, printmaking and installation, Derek Stroup’s artworks proliferate in the hazy edges of category and meaning. Drawn to the fringes and edges of what we know, Stroup chooses subjects and processes where understanding has frayed and potential develops its own agency. 

In his most recent body of work, Radiant Fields, Stroup presents images of Floyd Bennett Field, an abandoned airport on the shores of Brooklyn’s Jamaica Bay, decommissioned in the 1970s. Fifty years later, Stroup shows us sun-saturated weeds and bushes tangled among the crumbled runways, empty buildings and other signs of its former function. Security barriers and traffic patterns, now purposeless, surrender to their now-unknown identity in this “post-industrial ecological utopia.”

In this series, Stroup photographs this terrain with a simple cell phone and maximizes the image contrast, ultimately producing unique silkscreens of solely black and white pigment on stretched linen. While photographs, these unique works begin to take on the quality of paintings. Floating in the stretched canvas of natural fabric are blindingly crisp, sun-drenched vistas and details of this indeterminate landscape on the city’s edge. Large-scale versions of these images are made by returning to a photographic process, using light-sensitive screen emulsion on loose linen, sometimes magenta and sometimes blue. Unlike the sharply printed silkscreens, these photographs exposed on fabric allow for the process and material to take a hand in their final state. 

A parallel series presents highly technical, expertly photographed and printed color images of objects found in the fields—in particular, a brightly colored piece of striped fabric, tangled in driftwood is frayed by the elements but radiant in the light. At times presented as books, and other times adhered to installations of highly patterned plywood (a modular installation work called Utopia Library), images of twisted concrete and iron lay tumbled by the tide alongside sand, weeds and ocean debris. Patterns mimicking caution signs curiously appear, like weeds, throughout the installation; signifiers with nothing clear to reference but producing attention nonetheless. In these works, hierarchy atrophies and erosion reduces everything—manmade and natural—to a single state of refuse, possibly tumbling into something newly legible.

Derek Stroup is based in New York where he lives with his wife and children. He has participated in solo and group exhibitions including the Brandhorst Museum—Munich, The Museum of Contemporary Art⎯San Diego, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and elsewhere. He is the author of nine artist’s books including Tourmaline (2014) Utilities (2013), Every Instance Removed (2008), Candy (2006), Rope Swing Manifesto (2004), and Field Guide (2002). Recent projects include group exhibitions at BravinLeeProjects in New York and Owning Earth curated by Tal Beery at Unison Arts in the Hudson Valley. He received his BA from Williams College and his MFA from the University of California, San Diego.