SCULPTURE AND VISIONARY ARCHITECTURE
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,
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 produced award-winning theater productions, films, music recitals, dance performances, and multimedia exhibits.
The premise that we live in a geometric space, is at the hub of Draper’s creative ethos. His visionary architecture lives in the gap between the renderings and the building. Informed by physics, it explores the notion of man in relation to space, force, and its mechanistic creations. His work inspires conversations about human creativity, mind patterns, speed, and motion.
New York City’s landscape provides multiple ways for Draper to feed his vision. Urban Architecture through time is a constant inspiration to the artist, and its history informs his forward- thinking approach to designing.
In the conception of the Blimp sculpture project, WWI history meets the future. Created behind the idea of a means of advertising the performances of Satellite Collective, the sculpture is an example of the artist’s fascination with the mechanics of aeronautics. Non-rigid aerostats as metaphors both for the forces of nature and for ways to move people. The structure was set up across from the Grand Rapid’s Art Museum and served as the backdrop for dance performances, where the dancers moved around the floating blimp.
Motion in space, disjuncture, and fragmentation are some of the ways we perceive reality. Draper conceives his visions as expansions of architectural thought and as responses to forces, patterns, the improvised, and the accidental.
– Mariana Pavetto