ART CITIES:San Diego-Jennifer Steinkamp
Jennifer Steinkamp uses 3-D computer animation and new media to create video installations that activate architectural space and alter phenomenological perception. She designs and digitally simulates movement of organic and abstract forms. Her works are displayed as site-specific projections that amplify the architectural setting by blurring the boundary between real and illusionistic space.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego Archive
Jennifer Steinkamp’s animated environments, while beautiful and visually alluring, often carry subtle ominous references. Time plays a significant role in Steinkamp’s work, which often depicts cyclical occurrences such as changing seasons and life cycles. These cycles do not typically have a beginning, middle, or end, but are rather about the importance and necessity of change itself. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) brings back Jennifer Steinkamp’s immersive video installation, “Madame Curie”, a work that was commissioned by MCASD in 2011. The work was inspired by Steinkamp’s research into atomic energy, atomic explosions, and the effects of these forces on nature and takes its name from the French scientist Marie Curie, who is best known for receiving two Nobel Prizes for creating the theory of radioactivity and discovering the elements radium and polonium. Curie was also an avid gardener. Drawing from a list of over 40 flowering plants that appear in Curie’s biography, written by her daughter Eve, Steinkamp created realistic depictions of apple blossoms, daisies, fuschia, periwinkle, rambler rose, Virginia creeper, and wisteria, among others. Employing a complex computer algorithm, “Madame Curie” is an enveloping, panoramic world of interwoven branches and blossoms that strikes a taut balance between the natural world and computer-generated imagery. Like the Light and Space Movement artists from whom Jennifer Steinkamp draws her inspiration, her work proposes a new type of bodily experience. Her work also exists in time, however, in the context of the moving image through carefully realistic renderings of shifting flowers and trees undergoing momentous seasonal or climatic changes. As powerful phenomenological environments, Steinkamp’s installations ask for a novel reading of the role played by architecture, and take viewers beyond the physical boundaries of a built interior to contemplate their surroundings as more than a matter of space, but also as a factor of time, desire, and memory.
Info: Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), Jacobs Buildings, 1100 & 1001 Kettner Boulevard (between Broadway and B Street), San Diego, Duration: 19/5-20/8/17, Days & Hours: Mon-Tue & Thu-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.mcasd.org
