TEMP/ERATURE
TEMP/ORARY
TEMP/LATE
TEMP/O
{ABOUT}
Kelly Nipper at David Petersen Gallery
Sophia Chai reviews the recent solo exhibition
NEW REVIEW
Kelly Nipper’s art making manifests as sculpture, photography, film and video, performance, text, and various combinations of each, all dependent upon concept. Through rigorous research, her work is informed by alchemy, esoteric practices and theories of the occult. In many of our conversations, she has used the word “witchy.” Indeed, we have discussed modern dance pioneer Mary Wigman’s performance Witch Dance, as well as Alistair Crowley, hurricanes, MIT Self-Assembly Labs, and photographic darkrooms. We have also talked about Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis, a method and language for describing, visualizing, and documenting human movement; Étienne Jules Marey’s study of locomotion through the construction of his Physiological Station, a building-sized camera; Oskar Schlemmer’s experimental Bauhaus performances with black screen technology; Eliot Kaplan’s documentary of the making of Merce Cunningham’s CRWDSPCR; and the influence of Allan Kaprow, for whom she once worked as an archivist and assistant. With her ongoing projects, many of which she has been working through and with for over a decade and often involve collaboration with designers, engineers, dancers, and scientists, Nipper maps movement, stretches and suspends images in time, and attempts to bridge the gap between performance and object/image.
—David Petersen Gallery