Kinesthetic aesthetics.

JENNIFER STEINKAMP

ALBRIGHT-KNOX ART GALLERY 

BUFFALO, NEW YORK 

MARCH 14-JUNE 29, 2008

Video projections have become a ubiquitous visual delivery experienced in home theaters, classrooms, meeting rooms, concerts, and sidewalk advertisements, to the point that we no longer think about the mediation, nor are surprised by it. Through projected movies, video games, and PowerPoint shows, today's art audiences are familiar enough with this illuminating computer medium to take it for granted.

Jennifer Steinkamp's installations roughly parallel the popular growth of digital projector technology through the late 1990s and 2000s. To her credit, she is able to elicit presentational ideas and strategies that remain new despite this now-hackneyed mediation. The delivery is made obvious as the projectors are in the viewer's space casting video images permeated with a familiar XGA grid. Steinkamp's power to amaze is a result of her engagement with physical structures; she eschews standard screens in favor of activating walls or entire rooms. More than her use of digital technologies, this artist's work is powerful because she hacks architecture itself. Granted, the interiors of the Albright-Knox (a 1905 classical building) have been converted to stark modernist galleries, but nevertheless, Steinkamp configures eight endeavors (she has created more than seventy installations to date) to fit the Albright-Knox's architectural situations. Given each new space, she revisits the digital files to correct planar distortions and accommodate windows and doorways as well. The display of a few CAD diagrams, used for programming the projections, elegantly explains this strategy. Steinkamp's seamlessness is astonishing--it is as if the rooms were intended for the projections (although the "TV Room" space is significantly altered). Indeed, the viewer who inevitably walks in front of the projections is immersed and casts a shadow, but is also made a self-conscious interloper blocking the imagery.

Openings in the walls offer the powerful conundrum of reality competing with Steinkamp's virtuality. The windows that become a part of "Wreck of the Dumaru" (2004) reveal a framed world beyond, the inverse of a TV image surrounded by real space. "Dumaru" evokes altered perceptions and madness through its Fauvist coloration and dual perspectives (a red sea undulates before an aerial perspective of cyan waters). Much like the famed rabbit/duck illusion, Steinkamp forces us to focus on one perception or the other. Reality and virtuality are experienced equally well, but the adjustment required to reposition one reception from another is destabilizing. Herein lies an aesthetic moment, a split-second dumbfoundedness that mistakes reality as fake or prefers naturalism instead of the actual. Steinkamp conjures perceptual rifts in all her installations, but in ways unique to each work.

It is remarkable that the oldest piece in this exhibition, "TV Room" (1995), remains fresh in spite of technological progressions that constantly raise the bar for resolution and realism. While thirteen-year-old video games, user interfaces, or special effects seem graphically primitive by today's standards, "TV Room" remains one of her most powerful environments. This installation includes architectural interventions--three horizontal slabs cut across its middle. Steinkamp projects onto these three elements as well as the rear wall. The graphics suggest molten metal streams reflecting bright colors, and the currents induce vertigo, especially as they contradict each other (the back wall flows ever downward, the top and bottom slabs surge to the left, while the middle runs to the right). Subtle changes in tempo and diminution cause profound perceptual shifts--at moments the walls themselves seem to breathe, their Cartesian space is rendered Einsteinian.

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A later work, "I Want to Be a Cowboy" (2002) uses architecture in a much more subtle way, as the projected images command one vertical corner. This relatively shallow physical space makes the illusionistic bending and twisting metal rods quite believable, and all the more remarkable since Steinkamp hyperbolizes their motion by adding visual trails. The show's simplest piece, "Cowboy," is perhaps its most successful as its short video loops create an intense presence in an otherwise neutral gallery.

Far less successful is "Eye Catching" (2003). Conceived for a site with reflective water, the gallery's shiny marble floors are inadequate. Fluidity is the point of this piece featuring a tree that moves hypnotically, sometimes as if blown by wind, sometimes pulsing of its own serpentine accord. The missing water is necessary for the animation to make sense as the reflections would play on the viewer's presumptions and doubts as to whether the video or fluid is responsible for the doubled tree's plasmatic dance. Though this is Steinkamp's best-known project, she overreaches by inadequately situating it, and moreover, in the stead of a cult statue in this museum's naos.

It is questionable whether Steinkamp needs sound in her installations. The audio of "TV Room" stutters in static and quickens and slacks, and seems too expected and programmatic to do justice to the striking visual effects. Similarly, the wave-washes and sci-fi sine arcs that match the painterly swells of "A Sailor's Life is a Life for Me" (1998) are cliched, obvious soundtracks. Such audio schemes can be limiting, neither furthering immersion, nor allowing entry into a critique of the kinesthetic play. Though she has included audio in dozens of her endeavors, it is telling that her recent works do not have this element. As the exhibition's mute environments attest, the projections themselves are satisfyingly evocative.

WILLIAM V. GANIS is a critic, professor of art history, and gallery director at Wells College in Aurora, New York.