Shane Krepakevich is an artist whose work isn’t a problem to be solved so much as it is an attempt to solve a problem. The question he’s concerned with is what to do with the image in the early 21st Century. Admittedly, this was a problem in the last century as well, but the impact of mechanical reproduction and then mass production and then electronic reproduction and then digital reproduction keeps pushing the answer past the purview of artists, leaving them desperate for something to call their own.
A similar desperation has driven Juliana Zalucky – the owner of Zalucky Contemporary, where Krepakevich is currently showing – to stake her claim as the northwesternmost gallerist in Toronto. She’s blocks from the neighbourhood’s previous generation of settlers, neither of whom remain (Telephone Booth Gallery moved online and Narwhal Contemporary withdrew a smidgen to the east), because she resisted the lure of Dupont (newly minted home to a cluster of dealers) to occupy a storefront on a street where gentrification seems to be moving at a reasonable pace. Her challenge – the contemporary problem she must solve – is to survive the local economic upturn of which she will be a catalyst. 
Shane Krepakevich
However, by choosing to exhibit challenging work in a neighbourhood that is no longer challenging, she risks being the architect of her own demise. But the future is unpredictable in an art scene that is increasingly dispersed, so we might as well concentrate on the art and leave the real estate speculation alone.
As for the state of the image, Krepakevich advances some compelling proposals when he takes flat pictures into the realm of the sculptural. There are three pieces in particular wherein ostensibly significant photographs are obscured and overwhelmed by apparatuses that support them. The images are shots of computer monitors depicting ambiguous scenes from films further distorted by the light in the artist’s studio. There is no clear subject here (unless you’ve already guessed that surface is the subject), so our attention is drawn to the metallic frames and backing that lack content but resonate simply through their purposefulness. They ennoble the empty core. It’s here that Krepakevich’s work slides into the realm of design just as easily as any work of art disappears into décor. 
Shane Krepakevich
What remains is professional in finish and void of content in the same way a black hole is void of light. The pursuit of a work that teeters on the precipice of insignificance is symptomatic of a younger generation of artists who don't want their art to be too much about anything. Their teachers wallowed in the personal, while they prefer post-conceptual austerity tied to formalism suspended in the deep freeze. It’s chilly and impersonal, which isn't a dis, though it might be a diagnosis. Then again, conceptualism is impersonal and so is a lot of Modernism. Like those movements, Krepakevich is divining the future (as opposed to dwelling on the past) and his calculations are carefully measured.
Zalucky Contemporary: http://www.zaluckycontemporary.com/
Shane Krepakevich: Lightweight continues until March 19.
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.
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Shane Krepakevich at Zalucky Contemporary
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