Jennifer SteinkampSympathetic Image

Jennifer Steinkamp, Fly to Mars (no. 1), 2004. Digital projection, 168  x 216 inches. San José Museum of Art. Gift of Linda Besemer, and the Museum’s Collection Committee, in honor of the San José Museum of Art’s 35th anniversary, 2004.12. Courtesy of the artist; Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong; and greengrassi, London.

Fly to Mars (no. 1) (2004) is part of a computer-animated series of projections by the artist depicting hyperreal trees that twist and bend. Without beginning or end, they cycle through the seasons, bearing colorful blossoms then lush summer leaves and russet fall colors before losing their foliage. Influenced by experimental film, which often uses repetition rather than a storyline to focus viewer attention on film’s materiality rather than its content alone, Jennifer Steinkamp features the trees without narrative. Instead, their movement is abstract, “the motion of pattern and cycle.”1 The tree’s motion and changes over time imbue it with a kind of mortal energy mimicking our somatic experience of living, breathing, sleeping. They awaken sensations of our physical being, creating a “bond of sympathy”2 between our bodily experience and the projected image.

  1. Dave Hickey, 25 Women: Essays on their Art (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 76. ↩︎

  2. Dave Hickey, 25 Women: Essays on their Art (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 77. ↩︎