Gabriel Rodreick (Freaque)
Musician & Artist
 

Artist Statement
My art comes directly from the experience of my body. Some days my body feels like a torture chamber, some days I feel grateful that my body has kept me alive, heart pumping, brain lit up. Some days I feel nothing at all. I find that scribbling black pen on white paper feels like the most direct way to communicate the matrix of feelings that I experience towards my body on a yearly, monthly, daily, hourly, momentary basis. 

I encourage you to push past any uncomfortable feelings that initially come up. The art on its surface is horrific, dark and ghostly. But if you let your eyes soften and enter the details, you’ll begin to feel the warmth and care that goes into these images. 

The process of transmuting the experience of my body onto the page has taught me that pain is simply a messenger. Pain is not some horrific monster out to torture and kill us, pain is actually here to help! Pain is here to alert us of danger, death and decay. Pain is on our side. It’s up to us to interpret the signals pain sends us. It’s up to us to collectively determine how to shield our bodies from danger, fight and dance with our inevitable death, and slow our eventual and sacred decay back into the decomposing earth!

Bio
Gabriel Rodreick is a multidisciplinary artist from Minneapolis, MN. He injured his C5 vertebrae in a diving accident at the age of 15 in 2008. He has been living with quadriplegia since. Gabriel’s music, dance, poetry, and visual art has been his way of learning how to live in a new body post injury. His dark, dank, and dirty artistic voice tells stories of life blooming in the shadows.