Kelly Nipper’s practice in time-based media maps out the body through technology and geography to understand how to spatialize time. The broader strategy of imagining the possibilities of time in her work stems from the idea that a single condition or environment can endlessly fracture itself into different shapes and forms. She arranges things such as mountain ranges, looms, crystallography, land masses, taxidermy animals, geological time, and the poles in diagrammatic form to decide what will be flat and what will be given volume and instruction in the work.
Nipper draws on the morphology of photography, particularly its historical relation to geology and the occult, as well as the social sciences and its sub fields: movement analysis that exists at the intersection of verbal and nonverbal experience; the invention of communication theory that turned symbols and circuit design into a science and starting point for digital technology; and climate changes de-accelerated shifts in weather patterns and temperatures that are totally structuring the destruction of everything.
Her work has been the subject of solo presentations at The Museum of Modern Art; Kunsthaus Zürich; Performa; Hammer Museum; South London Gallery; Contemporary Art Museum Houston; Tramway; and Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle. Nipper is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship 2023 and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2007. Selected group exhibitions include Motion Capture: Recent Acquisitions in Media and Performance, Walker Art Center; Global Groove: Art, Dance, Performance and Protest, Museum Folkwang; Danser Sa Vie, Centre Pompidou; and 2010: Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum. Her work is in the public collections of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Migros Museum; Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Israel Museum; Hammer Museum among others. Nipper lives and works in Los Angeles.