Ineractive art exhibit first of Rice Art Gallery’s 2001-2002 season

Interactive
art exhibit first of Rice Art Gallery’s 2001-2002 season

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“One Saw;
The Other Saw,” a new installation by Los Angeles-based
artists Jennifer Steinkamp and Jimmy Johnson, opens the
Rice Art Gallery’s 2001-2002 season.

Using advanced
computer animation techniques, Steinkamp creates interactive
light projections that can be altered by visitors’
actions. Visitors also can activate electronic music composed
for the piece by Steinkamp’s longtime collaborator
Johnson, of the electronic music group Grain.

The public is
invited to meet Steinkamp at a free opening reception in
her honor Thursday, Sept. 20, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. She
will give brief remarks about the work at 6 p.m. Refreshments,
including ale handcrafted by the brew master at the Saint
Arnold Brewing Co., will be served. The exhibition will
be on view through Oct. 28.

Inside the gallery,
visitors will enter a 30-foot long tunnel and play with
the shadows they cast on the back-projected screen. This
element of play is an integral part of the work and one,
noted Steinkamp, that children respond to immediately. Though
adults may take slightly longer to succumb to this urge,
they too inevitably give in, mimicking the movement of the
light and experimenting with the sense of weightlessness
it creates.

Steinkamp’s
work has generated interest across diverse disciplines.
She has been interviewed on the Sci-Fi channel and received
commissions to create monumental works for U2’s concert
tours, the Staples Center in Los Angeles and the Fremont
Street Experience in Las Vegas. Her light projections have
been credited with the ability to make a square room appear
round, to make a solid space seem to liquefy and to transform
a built environment into a life-like breathing organism.
By focusing on the viewers’ experience, Steinkamp shares
the goals of the structuralist filmmakers of the 1970s,
who sought to make viewers aware of themselves even as they
watched the films. Steinkamp assumes an even more directive
role by constructing works that shape viewers’ experiential
relationship with light, sound, motion and architectural
space.

Steinkamp worked
for many years in the field of special effects computer
graphics before earning her bachelor’s and master’s
of fine arts from the Art Center of Design in Pasadena,
Calif. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Corcoran Gallery
of Art in Washington, D.C. She has been included in “Beau
Monde: Toward a Redeemed Cosmopolitanism,” the 2001
SITE Santa Fe Biennial, Sante Fe, N.M.; “Media/Metaphor,”
the 2001 Corcoran Gallery of Art Biennial, and the 47th
Biennale of Venice, 1997. She lives and works in Los Angeles,
where she is adjunct professor at UCLA. Examples of Steinkamp’s
past works are on her Web site, <http://jsteinkamp.com/>.

The Rice University
Art Gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to
5 p.m., Thursday until 8 p.m., and Sunday, noon to 5 p.m.