[2] Through the early 2000s, Shpungin engaged in a collaborative practice creating stylized, performative videos[3] and installations that explored themes like the intimacy of friendship.

[5][6] In her smaller sculptures and larger installations, Shpungin explores objects and architecture to emphasize contrasting themes such as domestic and communal, light and dark, or interior and exterior.

Such sculptures include a broken chair in "A Fixed Space Reserved for the Haunting" and a dead citrus sapling – complete with fallen leaves – in "I Especially Love You When You Are Sleeping" (both 2011).

The work, titled Drawing For a Reliquary, is a large-scale mixed-media installation made of various salvaged components and two fabricated steel truss structures, with every surface hand-drawn over with graphite pencil.

The surface treatment summoned involvement from dozens of participants, allowing for the communal mark-making to be both a part of the work's present history and as an offering to the past.

The exhibition centered around a marble-tiled arena covering a significant portion of Smack Mellon's 4,000 square foot main gallery floor.

A chandelier, a record player, seashells, chairs, chain link fencing, cast body parts, doors, cardboard boxes, a reconfigured American flag, and loose change add to the range of objects that Shpungin installed throughout the space.

In Migan's essay, To Make Bare The Shadow: On Diana Shpungin's Always Begin At The End, she writes: "The objects that comprise ABATE performatively rehearse the contradictions between the unstoppable march of time and our capacity to reorient the arrangements of life from whatever remains available for ongoing manipulation.

Reeling in or spinning out from various failures of so-called "progress," this teetering between urgent criticism and slowed-down contemplation is felt in Shpungin's buoying acts of repetition.

An original experimental score by renowned musician Mick Rossi (of the Philip Glass Ensemble) accompanies the performance, into which he incorporated Shpungin's own amateur out-of-tune playing on her childhood piano shipped from Riga, Latvia.

[1] Her work was the subject of an episode of PBS's Art Assignment, “Object Empathy”[5] and was cited in the introduction of Jerry Saltz's book "Seeing Out Louder".