Sarah Krepp

Ribbon of Darkness: Inferencing from the Shadowy Arts and Sciences

“Sarah Krepp’s transfigured ensembles, composed of slashed, abraded tire treads- harvested from a crash-littered DMV graveyard in Chicago- have a raw visceral appeal. Her explosive reliefs evoke a violent J. G. Ballard galaxy redolent of cataclysmic car collisions, shapes plowed together, saberlike jets of gas, smeared and obliterated color. The visual impact of destruction and resurrection, of tattered and tangled materials is so powerful that she makes us see familiar flora and fauna in anew and forbidding light. Consider her mortuary feathers, Beaudelairean flayed flowers of evil, abstract shooting-star sprays, and rubbery quilled shrouds cascading into space. Provocatively textured and arrestingly pitch-black, these slivered high-relief draperies forecast a techno-craft fashion that is literally cutting-edge.” —Barbara Maria Stafford, Professor Emerita, Art History, University of Chicago

KEEPING IT REAL ROCKFORD ART MUSEUM

“Anti-art materials have served as a strange staple of modern and contemporary art since the early 20th century. Through their radical and unruly nature as detritus turned art, found object art has offered up some of the most poignant critiques of our industrial and post-industrial age. Sarah Krepp steps onto this stage with a cast of objects and images drawn from her repertoire of accumulated junk with paint, and it is a tour de force. Krepp’s soulful rejoinders about the information age, rationalism, semiotics, excess, and abstraction coalesce in major works. Melodic entanglements, are made wonderfully unfamiliar. Order and chaos, reason and madness, the will to know versus surrendering to that which is unknowable: Krepp has done it again. 

Krepp hangs the huge Ur material of her practice on expansive walls. RIP CURRENTS (7’ x 10’), an assemblage of asymmetrical planks, carries Krepp’s characteristic flayed rubber tires, recuperated from highway junk, and are teased into dancing abstractions. Accompanying the road rubbish are measuring devices, tools and game pieces: rulers, clamps, dominoes, and scrabble tiles. In dominant red and black paint the color heeds warning, and yet, in these whimsical meditations that soap the gallery wall, caution has been thrown to the wind. Neither nature nor culture, rather hovering in the gap (to riff off Robert Rauschenberg’s famous quote), RIP CURRENTS, in title and form, hints at the great lake that has always inspired Krepp growing up in Chicago.” —Lisa Wainwright, Dean of Faculty, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2016

Delicious Vice

“Sarah Krepp begins with the grid—that is, as viewers, this is what first registers. From there, however, things quickly become disorienting and messy, for against the grid a fulsome play of gestural marks backs up lyrical arabesques sometimes made from highway detritus—specifically torn and sheared rubber tires, and sometimes layers of electrical parts and black and white meandering lines. With much of the recent work, there are rips in the actual canvas, with the hanging scraps turned under and stitched into the structure by its own loose threads. These are holes desecrating the grid—making it more vulnerable and gorgeous. Consistently, one also beholds an array of abstract signs, codes, symbols, charts, text, and games scattered across the all-over field—paraphernalia of the mind embedded within Krepp's ground of haptic stiching and gestural marks. But the grid endures, for it is her foundation—the modernist support, what Rosiland Krauss referred to as the ubiquitous emblem of the Modern era. And then Krepp mucks it up, skillfully. This is her delicious vice, offering a visual cacophony that strikes against the grid, with collaged maps that lead nowhere, warning signs that do not make us safe, board games never played, codes remaining ambiguous, charts that fail to measure, and the facture of the surface that just seduces and seduces. Such a persistent dichotomy of the grid and its opposite, the orderly with the unwieldy, reason and madness, is exactly the metaphor that Krepp has explored successfully in her oeuvre for many years.” —Lisa Wainwright, catalogue essay, 2009

Imagine the Rosetta Stone

“Now imagine it slathered in paint, sliced and diced, cut up and rearranged, layered with multiple visual, textual and photographic elements, and presented as diptych or triptych. Now you're in Sarah Krepp territory—it's a place where languages collide, where we totter on the brink of instability, where the edges of chaos brush up against our minds, where we try to process more information than we seem likely to absorb. But be patient, as our ancestors were with the Rosetta Stone—Sarah Krepp will eventually give up her secrets too, and provide a good deal of pictorial pleasure along the way. Ah, that pleasure—even if you pay no attention to the snippets of text embedded within her work, the parallel and desperate information layered inside like so much persistent ideated sedimentation, Krepp's work is always visually compelling. She has an instinct for the raw and was mixed-media and interdisciplinary before they were cool, and as efforts in an abstraction of painterly jammed visual incident, Krepp has always been completely in command.” —James Yood, catalogue essay, 2005

White Noise

Once it just referred to the background din of static in radio transmissions. Now, in our media-saturated environment, filled with the operations of sampling, layering, mixing, and remixing, the term "white noise" is applied to a great range of perceptual circumstances. Indeed, there need be neither noise nor whiteness for us to recognize the multivalent effect we characterize by that name. Sarah Krepp locates her ongoing series of paintings, drawings, and collages under the heading of White Noise, and it is no stretch of the imagination to comprehend the visual equivalent of an electronic hum in the densely layered material, technical, and textual effects in her art. From the beginning of her exhibiting career Krepp has shared with us her passion for process and color. What's been added to her repertoire in recent years is a sophisticated deployment of fragmentary and not quite legible linguistic elements that seemingly invite viewers to "read" her work as well as being absorbed with its optical pleasures. The present exhibition provides us with a suite of paintings filled with bits of text and graphic symbols borrowed from science, art, and mysticism, but it would be foolhardy for viewers to attempt to read between these lines. It is precisely Krepp's point that the recognizable signifiers she situates in her pictures are disengaged from any sensible context.” —Buzz Spector, catalogue essay, 2002