A Sea of Flowers Floats Through Times Square
UCLA Design Media Arts professor's work chosen for Times Square Arts' Midnight Moment project.
An internationally exhibiting installation artist, UCLA Design Media Arts Professor Jennifer Steinkamp works with new media and video to explore ideas about architectural space, motion, and perception. Her three-minute animation piece, Botanic, will be presented in Times Square for the May edition of Times Square Arts' Midnight Moment series.
It’s 11:30 on a weeknight in Times Square, and you can actually breathe here. The usual, excessive human hordes have dissipated. Elmo and Mickey Mouse are chatting under the news ticker, quickly pulling down their masks and going back into character any time they sense a group of tourists. Caricaturists and food carts are packing up, and late-night product deliveries for Sephora are being carted through on crates.
Three minutes before midnight, the electronic billboards pause their alternating loop of Lexus and Perrier ads to display a 10-second countdown. At zero, the screens fill up with flowers: it’s Jennifer Steinkamp’s Botanic, the chosen artwork for the May 2016 edition of Midnight Moment.
In Steinkamp’s short, three-minute animation, flowering condolence plants slide slowly across the lit screens. As they tumble against the edges of the frame, they quietly scatter the components of their being, transforming into piles of leaves, petals, twigs, and seeds. “The opportunity to create artwork on such a grand scale within extreme iconic architecture is amazing for me,” Steinkamp says in an announcement released by Lehmann Maupin. “I am excited about my work being presented in this context, and the meaning that the artwork can lend to the context and vice versa.”
The neighboring architecture does indeed define the work. The screens may be huge, but the flowers seem trapped in a narrow space behind their flat surfaces, forced to break apart as they come into contact with the indomitable elements at their sides. The Bubba Gump, McDonald’s, and Forever 21 signs aren’t going anywhere, and several non-participating, flickering billboards are still vying for attention, trying to sell you a soda or George Clooney’s latest movie. The relief from the ads is only partial. It may be that no art is strong enough to unseat the powers that be here, and the giant plants, bouncing around overhead, point out those limits. — Noémie Jennifer, May 4, 2016
Read the full article at the The Creators Project website.