The computer can make things beyond your imagination... I have always made things. I became an artist because I was always intrigued by making. It gives me a lot of pleasure and inspiration. I hope to pass this feeling on.
-Jennifer Steinkamp
Jennifer Steinkamp is an installation artist who uses digital technology as the medium through which she explores architecture, space and light. As an early proponent of the use of digital art she is recognized as a pioneer of new media in contemporary art. Her recent digital animation, Botanic, was featured in Times Square Arts: Midnight Moment during the month of May. For three minutes before midnight every night, her digitally animated floral fields filled the electronic billboards, slowly flowing and colliding within their panels alongside Times Square's media feeds and full-blown commercial ads. The ephemeral work was a meditative intermission from Times Squares' iconic bright flashing advertising.
The Lapis Press is pleased to present Botanic 4, a series of 30 unique prints by Jennifer Steinkamp from her digital animation of the same name. Botanic began with Steinkamp digitally hybridizing her own unique versions of flowering plants, each subtly distinct from their real world counterparts. She employs powerful animation software to choreograph them cascading and crashing within the parameters of large-scale video installations using state of the art projectors. These technologies allow her installations to adapt to any space, from sides of buildings to interior walls. For The Lapis Press suite, she selected a sequence of 30 nano moments from Botanic that she found most compelling, suspending the animation to capture the images used for each print. The same number of plants, flowers, stems, leaves, vines, and petals are contained in each print, but their configuration alters within the composition as they collide and scatter within each frame, each more captivating than the next.