Sarah Krepp still recalls her surprise as a child at seeing how Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte changed as she got nearer to it. Now her own work, which looks smooth and flat from a distance, breaks up into seemingly countless details once you’re close. Her mixed-media pieces at Roy Boyd include photographs, rolled-up bits of paper, pieces of tire treads, and painted or drawn “texts” in a panoply of symbolic systems: braille, Morse code, eye charts, sheet music, engineering diagrams. A year and a half ago, disturbed by the Iraq war, Krepp began to include DNA diagrams–a sign of what she calls the “fragility of our bodies”–among her other symbols. Fragments of cautionary road signs seem a warning against hubris. She stitched the torn-up pages of an entire dictionary into the large diptych White Noise: Red (Read) Silence as a way of “challenging the power of language,” she says. White Noise: Sea Song I and II both set a photograph of Lake Michigan, overlaid with a grid of lines representing human alterations to nature, beneath a densely layered and painted field created from rolled-up diary pages, to-do lists, and jottings she made while listening to NPR.
