GUATEMALACITY

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OLDSANJUAN

{ infrastructure is social class }

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Announcing a new, ongoing collaboration with Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark to explore ways of bringing Matta-Clark’s vision into contemporary art environments and alternate mediums like ballet, site specific sculpture, and visionary architectural environments. Kevin Draper is working with Gordon Matta-Clark ink drawings, creating fresh works that bring Matta-Clark’s 1970’s New York visions into dialogue with current visionary architecture.

New Work in collaboration with Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark

Matta-Clark’s ink and wash drawings are sampled, combined, and reconstructed in digital 3D spaces and then projected at cinematic scale to create intense visual environments. Draper works with a curated set of Gordon Matta-Clark’s drawings – outside of the main body, ink washes and early geometric combinations. Draper brings his unique vision of space, and the consumption of images and meaning over time – a futuristic architecture of void and gravity.

The result is a “recombinant” work, providing a three dimensional world around the original flat works and introducing space and time as modern constructs, a matrix on which Matta-Clark’s works are mirrored and multiplied, and sized up to architectural scale. In this way, live performers can be integrated into the ink drawings in a theatrically sized space.

Large Scale Projection built from 3D models that bring vintage Gordon Matta-Clark drawings into dialogue with modern visionary architecture.

The experience is one of seeing a New York from two different decades fifty years apart, churning, breaking down order, and mingling to form a very recognizable New York setting, but one hard to place in time.

3D SPACE AND MODEL

3D Models bring 2D “samples” into a virtual space and dialogue with each other, and with proposed gravity and structure.

Working with the Gordon Matta-Clark Estate to explore ways of bringing Matta Clark’s vision to life in alternate mediums like the performing arts. Images are large scale projections developed from Gordon Matta-Clark’s energetic arrow drawings.

NEW INFRASTRUCTURE RESEARCH

A time-based study of infrastructure decay and the different impacts experienced by social groups.

“ROCKAWAY – PUERTO RICO”

A time-based study of infrastructure decay and the different impacts experienced by social groups.

LIAR LEAR KING

A Ballet & Animated Film

a collaboration with Lora Robertson and Grand Rapids Ballet

Premiered Oct/2022, Grand Rapids Ballet

“LIAR LEAR KING” is a multi-stage, multi-form work directly facing the impact of narcissism and bullying on our society. It fuses dance, short film, visual art, live music, opera, and spoken word into an experience centered by image and movement, and driven by story.

“Chelsea”, digital drawing, 2022; stage design for “Liar Lear King”, capturing the colors and mood of SoHo, NYC in recovery; premiered at Grand Rapids Ballet, 50th Anniversary Celebration

“Brooklyn”, digital drawing, 2022; stage design for “Liar Lear King”, capturing the colors and mood of SoHo, NYC in recovery; premiered at Grand Rapids Ballet, 50th Anniversary Celebration

Liar Lear escapes to his beach house; hand-drawn animation, digitizing pad; 2022; Premiered in Rosa Parks Circle, Grand Rapids, MI, 2022 with support from Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce, Artprize, and the Padnos Foundation.

“Nuclear Family”, Digital Poster Series, 2022; forced perspectives of Park Avenue, and aging queen beach houses in Rockaway Park are the beginning and end of a journey to madness.

objects and clutter of New York, 1972; digital drawings 2022; these rain down upon Cordelia

Liar Lear King’s Family Theater, scenic paintings by Kevin Draper; produced by Kevin Draper and Lora Robertson;

Liar Lear King, dancer 1, dancer 2, dancer 3, dancer 4; premiered by Grand Rapids Ballet; scored by Ellis Ludwig-Leone, choreography by Danielle Rowe, costumes by X.

Credits/ story by Kevin Draper with writing team Tamar Charney, Nikhil Melnechuk, Lora Robertson, and Stelth Ulvang; production by Kevin Draper; score by Brooklyn composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone; Commissioned and premiered by Grand Rapids Ballet

SAD BLIMP & SAD BLIMP ROCKET

A Featured Public Project of Satellite Collective with Kevin Draper and Lora Robertson. Twin Installation at Rosa Parks Circle and Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum Waterfront

Premiered and flown Sep-Oct/2022, Rosa Parks Circle, a Maya Lin Monument & Ah-Nab-Awen Park, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum, Commissioned by ArtPrize as a Featured Public Project.

SAD BLIMP is a multi stage project that begins with near ground installations of 40-50 feet aerostats acting as both sculpture, video screen and media hub. Draper’s creative and engineering abilities are tasked as he designs the machine, tower, and control structures together with a team of aerodynamic engineers from the University of Michigan.

40′ blimp and 50′ mast, constructed of translucent polyurethane fabric and nylon ripstop material, handsewn. Mast constructed of single white pine tree, felled and sawn in Croton, MI.

Digital 3D Modeling

Engineering Team, University of Michigan, Raytheon

Fabrication Team: Amish

Credits/ Design and Engineering by Kevin Draper, with engineering team X, X, X.

Animated Film

A Satellite Rogue Film Collaboration with Lora Robertson

Premiere: Sep/2022, Rosa Parks Circle / Grand Rapids Art Museum Plaza

This film is number six in a series of collaborations with filmmaker Lora Robertson, Brooklyn composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone, Stelth Ulvang of The Lumineers, and Aaron Severini. These films have grown in complexity and serve as the creative core of larger performance pieces. Kevin Draper has produced the films independently, until recently joining with Lora Robertson as Co-Producer.

Draper’s hand drawn animations interact with Lora Robertson’s stop motion animation to create a film setting that is New York City, 1972 and the English Channel is now the East River.

Credits/ story by Kevin Draper with writing team Tamar Charney, Nikhil Melnechuk, Lora Robertson, and Stelth Ulvang; production by Kevin Draper; score by Brooklyn producer BAILE inspired by works of Ellis Ludwig-Leone

Sad Blimp

at Ah-Nab-Awen Park, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum

Premiered and flown Sep-Oct/2022, Ah-Nab-Awen Park, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum, Commissioned by ArtPrize for Satellite Collective with artists Kevin Draper and Lora Robertson as a Featured Public Project.