SCANS AND DIGITAL DRAWINGS
Engineer, Architect, Artist, Designer, Printmaker, Creative Director, Stage Designer, Poet, Playwright, and Filmmaker – Kevin Draper (1967) was born in Michigan, USA.
After a few years working as a mechanical engineer, he completed a Master’s in Architecture, studied printmaking, and began his trajectory as a multimedia artist.
In 2010 he moved to New York City. There, he founded Satellite Collective, a vibrant and innovative community of creatives that has assembled award-winning theater productions, films, music recitals, dance performances, and multimedia exhibits.
Among the media the artist employs are scans and digital imaging; a technology used in the exploration of our world, and the study of our bodies. Scanning involves capturing detailed information, and it is invaluable in archeology and art preservation. In his scans, Kevin Draper challenges the way we view time and space: Everyday objects are seen from the dimension of a digital void. The motion and light of the scanner preserve things in a suspended state: Time as a function of space, as a point of reference in an infinite geometric continuum.
The work presents digital still-lives of Americana: Toys, food boxes, broken figurines of religious icons like Jesus, or Buddha; as well as folk icons like an Indian chief, and broken ceramic horses. These are the fragments and debris of future antiquity, exploring the psychological perception of an individual’s space. Draper also scanned his own body. After all, the body holds the passing of time. The artist’s private garden of earthly delights.
Other digital images are iPad drawings and multimedia in response to the artist’s urge to create as fast as possible. Geometric space distortion and a constructivist frame of reference meet gestural free-hand strokes, cutouts, type, and negative images of mechanical parts created with spray paint and crayons.
The results capture the unexpected momentum of the creative process: Time as the distance covered; and disjuncture as the point between stop and action.
– Mariana Pavetto