Mike Kelley

Artist Jennifer Steinkamp American, born 1958

Date2007

MediumVideo installation

DimensionsDimensions variable; duration: 8 min. loop

ClassificationsTime Based Media

Credit LineGift in honor of Dr. Lawrence J. Wheeler, director of the North Carolina Museum of Art (1994-2018) from Julian T. Baker Jr., Rhoda L. and Roger M. Berkowitz, Dr. Thomas D. Brammer and Mr. Robert S. Watson, Angeline J. Bryant, Blake Byrne, Marion Johnson Church, Paul Edward Coggins, Dr. W. Kent Davis, Joyce Fitzpatrick and Jay Stewart, Dr. Carlos Garcia-Velez, Marty Hayes and Michael Cucchiara, Mr. and Mrs. Vaughn Hayes, Eric and Tara Hirshberg, Ian Huckabee, Bill G. Johnson, Thomas S. Kenan III, Suzanne R. McKinney, R. Glen Medders, Dr. Cynthia S. Payne, Melissa Peden and Robert Irwin, Susan L. Petry, Michael Rubel and Kristin Rey, Kimerly Rorschach, Jeffrey Williams and Patrick Sears, Allen G. Thomas Jr., Caroline Hickman Vaughan, Robert A. Sandefur and Robert P. Venuti, Drs. Zannie and Glenn Voss, Caroline and Richard Wright, and James Walker Crow; Technology funded with generous support from IBM Corporation

Object number2009.14

On View

Not on view

Label TextJennifer Steinkamp, a Los Angeles based artist with a background in graphic design and digital animation, creates high definition video projections that combine computer technology, digital animation software and projected light. Her extremely sophisticated and spectacularly beautiful video projections utilize light, color and movement to create hybrid images that are inspired by the natural world but created entirely by her using 3-D computer animation software. Juxtaposing the real and the artificial, the natural and the manmade, she exaggerates and heightens elements of the natural world to make something that appears hyper-real and magical.

Mike Kelley is a luminous eight-minute projection of a single tree that is depicted as it changes through the seasons—endlessly cycling, every two minutes, from the green leaves of spring to the pink blossoms of summer to the varied colors of autumn leaves to bare winter branches. The tree’s trunk is firmly rooted in the ground, as if it is growing out of the floor, but its branches slowly swirl and sway in a poetic, mesmerizing, and highly choreographed dance. Steinkamp’s radiant trees take on anthropomorphic qualities, like characters from a bewitched, enchanted forest and the artist has cited a childhood memory of the orchard filled with talking apple trees from The Wizard of Oz as an influence on her work. Mike Kelley is one of several works that the artist made in honor of former teachers, and she refers to the trees as portraits. Kelley is an artist who was also Steinkamp’s teacher in art school in California in the late 1980s.
[L. Dougherty, 2010]
ProvenanceCreated California, 2007; collection of the artist; [Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York]; sold to NCMA, 2009.
Published ReferencesDenise Markonish, ed, Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape (exhibition catalogue) (Cambridge and North Adams: MIT Press and MASS MoCA, 2008), illus. (color) 205-07.

Linda Johnson Dougherty, "New Acquisition: Jennifer Steinkamp Video Installation," in North Carolina Museum of Art Preview (Fall 2010), discussed and illus. (color) 20-21.

Linda J. Dougherty, entry for Mike Kelley, in North Carolina Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections, rev. ed. (Raleigh: North Carolina Museum of Art, 2010), 564, illus. (color) 565.

0 to 60: The Experience of Time through Contemporary Art (exhibition catalogue) (Raleigh and Penland, NC: North Carolina Museum of Art and Penland School of Crafts, 2013), mentioned 19, illus. (color) 18 (catalogue only, not in exhibition).
Exhibition HistoryNorth Adams, MA, MASS MoCA, "Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape," May 25, 2008-April 12, 2009.

Raleigh, NC, North Carolina Museum of Art, “Reflections on Light: Works from the NCMA Collection,” September 9, 2020–February 14, 2021.

Athens, GA, Georgia Museum of Art, "Jennifer Steinkamp: The Technologies of Nature," December 18, 2021–August 21, 2022.

Raleigh, NC, North Carolina Museum of Art, "The People's Collection, Reimagined," October 7, 2022–February 6, 2023. Object Rights Statement

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