Jennifer Steinkamp
| Jennifer Steinkamp | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 22, 1958 |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Installation art, Media Art |
Jennifer Steinkamp (born December 22, 1958) is an American installation artist who works with video and new media in order to explore ideas about architectural space, motion, and perception.
Born in Denver, Colorado in 1958, Steinkamp is the eldest of five children, three girls and two boys. Her family lived in a number of areas before settling in Edina, Minnesota. In 1979, Steinkamp moved to Los Angeles to attend Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, studying with Mike Kelley, Gene Youngblood, and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. She then transferred to the California Institute of the Arts, where she studied experimental animation. Steinkamp returned to Art Center to earn her BFA in 1989 and her MFA in 1991. In 2011, Art Center recognized Steinkamp with an Honorary Doctorate. She is currently a professor in the department of Design Media Arts at UCLA.
Steinkamp uses digital projection to transform architectural space, providing the viewer with a synaesthetic experience, often working in collaboration with musicians Jimmy Johnson and Andrew Bucksbarg to integrate sound into her work. While her career began with brightly colored abstract projections, since 2003 she has increasingly incorporated nature-based imagery into her work — gnarled trees that twist, turn, and change seasons; rooms filled with undulating strands of flowers. In doing so she has brought digital art into the mainstream of contemporary art. Her use of vernacular imagery and embrace of beauty result in environments that reference the sublime, as did the Hudson River School painters. Like her art historical precedents, Steinkamp conveys the magnitude and power of nature—a nature that is not always benign. Premature, a series first displayed in 2010, shifts the focus of Steinkamp's subject to life and death. She explores this topic with projections of slithering veins and arteries that evoke the eerie inspiration of her work. Her work has the power to communicate to a broader public, to “convert” a more traditional art audience, familiar with the use of computer graphics for video games but unaware of other creative applications.
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