Steinkamp, a Los Angeles–based installation artist, works with 3-D animation in order to explore ideas about architectural space, motion, and phenomenological perception. This exhibition offered a comprehensive view of this important artist’s work from 1993 to 2006.

A visit to the rooms of living light that Southern California computer artist Jennifer Steinkamp creates can be deceiving and disorienting. A quick glance at a piece like Rapunzel, and one might mistake it for an especially crystalline flower print blown up to wall size—a page from a modern herbal maybe.

But look longer, and this delicate tangle of straw flowers turns into a flowing, twisting kinetic mass of whipping blossoms. The piece, projected from across the gallery, is a computerized animation running on a brief cycle that refreshes every few minutes, although the motion of the scores of intertwined stems produces such a complex dance that you can’t really pinpoint the repetition.

The survey of Steinkamp’s remarkable digital-media concoctions now at the San Jose Museum of Art shows how the artist has been using software to breathe life into the pictorial—both abstract and figurative. The two-wall installation The Wreck of the Dumaru heaves and dips with so much visual fury that it might induce a physical reaction. Its perceptual impact is certainly enough to leave the distinct impression that the floors and walls are coming unmoored.

Seeing these columns of fruitful, swaying greenery imparts a transcendent sense of scale—the immensity of the universe can be experienced at any level of perspective. At the same time, there is something extremely comforting and domestic about the piece; Steinkamp has taken the idea of pattern painting and pushed it to its logical extreme: living wallpaper.

Steinkamp’s animations are fascinating meta-art exercises. They provide all the sensual delight of paintings combined with the ephemeral frisson of installation art. You can contemplate them for hours, but they aren’t commodifiable art objects; they are customized—and infinitely reproducible—software programs. They are the soul in the computer.

The exhibit features an excellent catalog by SJMA senior curator JoAnne Northrup covering Steinkamp’s extensive career.

This exhibition Traveled to the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, February 23, 2007–May 13, 2007 and to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, March 14, 2008–June 29, 2008

Part of the text above excerpted from Michael S. Gant’s review in Metro Silicon Valley

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