Shaun Krupa “Lost Body”

Safe Gallery

[Image: Shaun Krupa "Untitled (Airplane 2)" (2018) oil on canvas, 108 x 6 in.]

This event has ended.

“Tiktaalik pulled herself through the swamp and onto land with her primitive digits.

The Lockheed Electra’s chrome propeller pulled Amelia Earhart through the clouds, around the world.

I wish I could inhabit the clouds and sea as perilously.”

Shaun Krupa’s work describes the path of one form swimming through another. He presses his living body into geometric forms made of slumping mud. He sleepwalks while pulling apart an electric box fan. He organizes space as a series of trials, like the forts and haunted houses built by children. Nostalgic passage through this space resembles that of religious ceremony, burial architecture, creation myth. During performance, Krupa dissolves and disappears. Eschewing personhood in solidarity with his medium. His sculptures have the ghost-marks of familiar creatures, clawing their way along. Krupa’s personal monuments break down the machine into body parts, exposing the heart, which proceeds.

This is Krupa’s first solo exhibition at Safe Gallery. The soft pencil drawings of his castings are blueprints for his physical endeavors - the ultimate goal of which is to become one with the earth.

These works on paper examine the ground below us in relation to our bodies. The careful planning seen in these renderings manifests into a group of cast soil-cement body molds.

The surrounding canvases of propellers, which he analogizes to hands, are painted with the same sensitivity as if they were flowers.

Krupa uses performative modes to make a series of “fish prints”, in which he guts a fish and dips the various parts in paint; the fish body analogous to his own unexplorable interior. Krupa also presents a series of still lives, each centered around a human hand, and each providing an alternate milieu for the aforementioned extremity.

Alternative timelines, unearthed natural habitats, evolutionary creatures, and a look at an increasingly mechanized society are all themes that push and pull Krupa’s work in Lost Body. A performance of the same name will be presented at the gallery on March 20, 2019.

Shaun Krupa has shown work in New York at Klaus Gallery, Essex Flowers, Greenspon Gallery, Soloway, the Gramercy Park Hotel Penthouse, as well as Candid Arts Trust in London. He has held residencies with the Shandaken Project, Vermont Studio Center, and Micro Residency Galeria Parasito.