Two artists discover the powers of light and space

By Kristen Peterson

Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Jennifer Steinkamp’s digital installations are mesmerizing, almost hypnotic.

Digitally rendered flowers cascade down walls like a waterfall. They sway and bounce in a never-ending sequence of motion, object, detail and color.

Trees twirl on their trunks, their branches shedding, blossoming, flourishing.

Exquisitely choreographed sheets of patterned, silky fabric ripple and tumble in free falls, single file or in herds — a slow avalanche of fabric.

So what is Steinkamp doing discussing the “intersections and coincidences” between her work and that of the late minimalist sculptor Dan Flavin on Thursday at the Las Vegas Art Museum?

Her mostly floor-to-ceiling, very detailed projections are perpetually in motion. Flavin’s fluorescent and brightly colored tube sculptures are static. Her technological tools seem to counter his industrial material.

It’s enough to raise an eyebrow at first.

But the parallels become obvious: Light and space alter architectural interiors and create a sensory experience.

“I think we both discovered things about phenomenal perception as we worked on our projects,” Steinkamp said in a phone interview this week. “It did really fascinate me how we did cross over similar paths 30 years apart.”

While Steinkamp was preparing for a lecture to accompany a Flavin retrospective last year at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, she realized the depth of the similarities.

With the artists sharing a space at the “Las Vegas Collects Contemporary Exhibit” — Steinkamp’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man (Matilija Poppy)” (2008) and Flavin’s “untitled” (1968) and “untitled (to S.A., lovingly)” (1987) — Steinkamp will discuss the similarities in a lecture titled “situation/installation, exposition/exhibition, dedication/title.”

This isn’t the first Las Vegas has seen of Steinkamp, a Denver-born artist who lives in Los Angeles.

Some will remember “Aria,” a five-minute light and sound piece commissioned by the Las Vegas Arts Commission in 2000 for the Fremont Street Experience canopy. The visually intense abstract work stretched four city blocks and included techno music and a changing composition of profound colors and shapes moving through space.

“It was, at the time, the largest video display in the world and so architectural,” Steinkamp says. “I just had to do it. That really pushed me just because of the scale and the curves and sort of creating in such a public sphere.”

“Hurdy Gurdy Man” is nothing of that magnitude. The projection of a small-scale cluster of poppies is gentle, intimate, quietly transfixing as it seems to respond to a virtual breeze.

The switch from abstract to such pristine representational projects was a natural progression made possible by technological advances, she says.

“I’ve always been sort of borderline, working with water and nature in that sort of way and being interested in motion that’s related to nature or experience.

“In the past work it was really more about dematerializing the architecture by filling entire walls. Then the work became more about the object — as much as projected light can be — and so it kind of shifted the relationship of how you relate to it.”

Whether it’s a giant, ethereal abstraction transforming a space or animated trees or flowers, it’s impossible not to be fully engaged.