In Focus: Jennifer Steinkamp

Jennifer Steinkamp

New York

Nov 10, 2022–Jan 7, 2023November 10, 2022–January 7, 2023

501 West 24th Street

New York, NY 10011

Lehmann Maupin announces In Focus: Jennifer Steinkamp, a presentation featuring one of the Los Angeles-based artist’s newest works, Renewal 2. After recognizing the incredible potential of computer animation in the early 1980s, Jennifer Steinkamp began working exclusively in digital media and has created an expansive body of work spanning the last 30 years. A pioneer in the field of 3D animation, Steinkamp uses cutting-edge technology to render abstract and representational forms in motion, including organic forms such as trees, flowers, floating fabrics, rocks, fruit, and primordial organisms. Her works are often displayed as site-specific projections, and she actively engages architectural features, transfiguring existing spaces while simultaneously allowing these sites to transform her own installation. For In Focus: Jennifer Steinkamp the gallery will present Renewal 2, a panoramic projection that depicts a burning prairie native to the Midwestern United States. This new body of work stems from Steinkamp’s research of pre-settlement prairies native to Missouri for a site specific commission with Commerce Bank in St. Louis, which will be unveiled in 2023.

Steinkamp began creating digital animations and projections in 1989, with her now famous Gender Specific, which was shown simultaneously at the artist-run Bliss House in Pasadena and the Santa Monica Museum of Art in Southern California. Her work remained largely abstract for over a decade, and she created numerous installations and projection pieces that explored vision and perspective, audience participation and shadow play, and the limits of 3D animation, computer rendering, and projection technologies. In 2002, Steinkamp created her first work featuring botanicals—a protest against war in a post-9/11 landscape that she titled Jimmy Carter, after the pacifist former president who received a Nobel Peace Prize the same year. She has since continued to employ botanical subjects, including trees that cycle repeatedly through changing seasons, fruits that shift and squash themselves against video displays, and flowers moved by invisible winds that burst apart and then reconstruct themselves in an endless loop.

Jennifer Steinkamp

Renewal 2, 2022

In Renewal 2, Steinkamp incorporates a number of species indigenous to pre-settlement prairies, including anemone, thimbleweed, arrowhead, bergamot, bluestem grass, climbing prairie rose, cone flower, cordgrass, heliotrope, lobelia, cardinal flower, sunflower, sweet pea, trout lily, and violet missouriensis. Here, Steinkamp imagines a burning prairie, a phenomenon that occurs sporadically in nature as well as a practice used for thousands of years by Indigenous peoples. Prairie burning is carried out periodically in order to maintain the health and integrity of the prairie landscape, prohibiting the growth of trees and invasive species and returning nutrients to the soil. As fire whips through Steinkamp’s pre-colonial prairie, her animated butterflies float gently across the landscape, remaining unharmed. Here, an apparent act of destruction paradoxically prompts growth and renewal.

Jennifer Steinkamp (b. 1958, Denver, CO; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is a pioneer in the field of 3-D animation. Working exclusively in digital media, she uses cutting-edge technology to render organic and abstract forms in motion to give deeper insight into the often-unseen complexities of the natural environment in relation to human perception. Her immersive installations are projected at a large scale in response to the architecture in which they appear and alter the viewer’s typical experience of an art object, inviting a more sensorial understanding of our relation to space and time. For each series, Steinkamp designs and digitally simulates the movement of organic and abstract forms such as trees, flowers, floating fabrics, asteroids, organisms, and fruit. Her work is an examination of the natural environment that engages with art historical genres such as 16th century Dutch still-life painting, science fiction, scientific illustrations and political subjects.

Steinkamp’s works are displayed as site-specific projections that amplify their architectural setting by blurring the boundary between real and illusionistic space. These animated environments often have underlying personal or historical significance. For example, with three of her tree animations, shown in every season, Steinkamp titles each as an homage to a former teacher, such as Miss Znerold, Judy Crook or Mike Kelley. Other series, like Still-Life, are a critical nod to the 16th century genre of Dutch and Flemish still-life painting that offered visual allegories about the fragility of life and the passage of time. Composed through the careful orientation of everyday objects such as food, flowers, dead animals, and plants, these historical works were often notable for their static quality and macabre representation of death. In Steinkamp’s re-imagination of the still life, she animates this genre through the representation of (female) fruit bearing plants that move and collide, she is fascinated by the incorporeal in nature and science. If anything, this is a consistent current in her artwork. There is so much more in the universe than what we sense and feel; She believes we are surrounded by sentience in all lifeforms. She uses the tangible invisible forces in air and the uncanny forms and motion of plants to communicate this.

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