Written by Miles Stemp

Shane Krepakevich is interested in the body’s relationship with space, being either physical or imagined.  More specifically, he is looking at the movement and understanding of bodies in a system. Krepakevich utilizes principals of design and elements of architecture and minimalism to investigate a personal geography that is also public.  It is universal because the scope is so broad that we can all relate to it and because of the poetry in the ideas and notions in the work.  It is a different kind of poetry, a more scientific poetry, finding its beauty in the facts.  As a result, a beautiful symbiosis develops between art, science, architecture, and design that is Krepakevich’s work.

With his piece, San Giorgio’s Floor Remembered in Plywood, there is a physical relationship to the room where the viewer has to navigate around the floor. There is also a familiarity and unfamiliarity with the floor. I think perhaps it’s the strong similarity to Sol LeWitt (albeit a flattened LeWitt’s) combined with the everydayness of a floor and common materials used to make the floor (plywood).  It creates this pleasant disconnect in my head, where I find I am not too sure what to do: walk on it or admire it.  The very fact that it is off a plinth heightens the experience, making it seem innocuous yet powerfully dominating.

Comparably, with Approximate Drawings, the space is imaginary and very specific to the artist, yet very familiar to the viewer.  Unlike San Giorgio’s Floor Remembered in Plywood, these drawings represent an abstract approach to space and time. Krepakevich quantifies the unquantifiable and investigates the everyday by drawing connections that few would be able to make.  He understands the relationships that we have to our surroundings, whether it is a river relative to a first kiss, or the size of an apartment compared to the size of the person living in it.  These are all things we have experienced and continue to experience, now condensed into a clean little graph.  There is something very ironic and reassuring about life minimized into a graph, it’s the opposite of what we strive for, yet it is inescapable.

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