Camille Utterback: Tracing Time/Marking Movement

MacArthur Foundation Fellow Camille Utterback is an internationally acclaimed artist whose interactive installations and reactive sculptures engage participants in a dynamic process of kinesthetic discovery and play. Her work explores the aesthetic and experiential possibilities of linking computational systems, through her own software programming, to human movement and gesture in layered and often humorous ways.

This exhibition presents four interactive digital installations, including the landmark work Text Rain (1999), created by Utterback in collaboration with the Israeli artist Romy Achituv. In this work, letters, words, and phrases from Evan Zimroth’s poem “Talk, You” cascade like discrete objects onto the projected image of a viewer/participant, to “rest” momentarily on heads, arms, and shoulders. This exhibition includes one of Utterback’s digital animations and a display of her recent public art projects that gives insight into her working process.

Utterback’s artworks’ significance rests with their activation of basic human responses: the pleasure at the sheer gracefulness of the animated images, the gratification at being able to participate in their unfolding, and the intellectual stimulation that comes from integrating abstract language with physical movement to posit a new level of communication.

This exhibition was organized by the Frist Art Museum and co-curated by Frist Art Museum Chief Curator Mark Scala and Curator Trinita Kennedy.

Location: Gordon Contemporary Artists Project Gallery