Jennifer SteinkampTransforming Architecture

a red lit empty gallery behind a projected display of blue green red yellow and pink blocks of color
Installation view of Jennifer Steinkamp, One saw; the other saw, 2001. Digital projection installation. Courtesy of Jennifer Steinkamp; Rice University, Houston, Texas; Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong; and greengrassi, London.

Jennifer Steinkamp uses computer graphics and three-dimensional animations to create pulsing and undulating visual fields of pattern and abstract motion that shift our perspective. Working within the architecture of buildings, her projected images reconfigure surfaces to create the illusion of passages and portals or play with doorways to render floating imagescapes; immaterial substances such as computer graphics and light manifest as corporeal. In One saw; the other saw (2001), a light and sound installation at Rice University Art Gallery on which she collaborated with the composer Jimmy Johnson, a projection on the gallery’s glass-front wall created the illusion of three dimensionality from both the interior and exterior of the space. “I use light to dematerialize architecture,” says Steinkamp.1 Using sensors to detect the movement of passersby, the projected image shifted in response to the viewer’s point of view so that the architecture itself seemed to be moving.2 Such motion-filled environments defy architecture’s space and material structure to induce visceral responses that border on vertigo and alter one’s mental state.

  1. Jennifer Steinkamp and Jimmy Johnson: One saw; the other saw (2001), exhibition description on Rice University Art Gallery website, available at ricegallery.org/steinkamp-johnson. ↩︎

  2. Rochelle Steiner, Wonderland (St. Louis: Saint Louis Art Museum, 2000), 24. ↩︎