Kelly Nipper uses time-based and lens-based media, including photography, video, dance, and movement analysis, to work through how motion becomes form. The body is a site of material research and a technology through which time is spatialized. Across moving image and material processes, time and matter are held in suspension as dimensions simultaneously expand and contract.

Photography provides the technical basis of the practice. The camera, stage, and tank are rooms in which matter and spatial conditions are reorganized. Movement makes space visible, while measurement establishes the conditions through which images take form.

The practice works from the dancer’s internal organization. Over more than two decades, research with Marissa Ruazol has developed through internal initiation and organ-based movement. Spatial orientation is continually altered by forces acting upon the body. The dancer assimilates these forces through internal shape change and the loss of stable verticality. Principles from Bartenieff Fundamentals and Laban Movement Analysis inform the research. Still and moving images register these transformations. In motion capture and computational imaging, points and lines are a technical anatomy traced through physiological and chronophotographic studies, spatial cosmologies, and correspondences between bodies and the cosmos. As the room gives way to open terrain and the dancer’s body to landform, photography and geology carry time materially, though at radically different scales.

Nipper is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and received the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2007. Her work has been the subject of solo presentations at the Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthaus Zürich, Hammer Museum, South London Gallery, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, and Tramway. Selected group exhibitions include Motion Capture: Recent Acquisitions in Media and Performance at the Walker Art Center; Global Groove: Art, Dance, Performance and Protest at Museum Folkwang; Danser Sa Vie at the Centre Pompidou; and the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Her work is held in public collections including the Migros Museum, Walker Art Center, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, and MOCA.

Kelly Nipper Studio is based in Los Angeles. For inquiries, please contact kelly@kellynipper.com.