CCS BARD

Curated by Alicia Ritson, CCS Bard Curatorial Fellow 2012 – 2013

In her research-based media practice, Kelly Nipper works with dancers, generating photographs, videos, and events. She explores how and where the formal and social fields of each of these mediums relate, paying particular attention to their spatial, temporal, and expressive capacities. Nipper considers the acts of transcription and translation as she shifts between modes of production that have distinct sets of properties and demands. Repetition and inscription become processes through which to experience ideas and concepts as forms or things.

For her project at CCS Bard, Kelly Nipper returns to Circle Circle, a body of work in which the structure and movement of the hurricane spurs questions of how flow in general is communicated and given form in a number of specific contexts. This particular accumulation of works for Circle Circle centers on Nipper’s eponymous videodance of 2007/2012, and features new work including a collaborative printed project with designer Michael Worthington and curator Alicia Ritson.

Across her selected media, Nipper considers the language of movement and the score as vehicles for both the documentation and instruction of movement. She also works through different modes for reengaging prior artistic practices. In dealing with such legacies, as with well-established ordering systems for all kinds of phenomena, Nipper strikes a balance between adopting canonical vocabularies and finding agency in a distinctly personal rephrasing.

Kelly Nipper will give an Artist’s Talk as part of the CCS Bard Speakers Series
Monday May 6, 2013 at 3pm

Artist Bio
Nipper’s work with performance expands upon her background in photography, film, and video. She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1995 after studying within the photography program. Her BFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design, received in 1993, was in media arts with a concentration in photography. Among Nipper’s most important interlocutors has been Allan Kaprow—the artist who conceived of Environments and Happenings—for whom Nipper worked for several years as studio manager and archivist.

Nipper has been the subject of solo exhibitions and performances at several national and international institutions, including Kunsthaus Zürich; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tramway, Glasgow; and Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. She has been included in numerous important group exhibitions, including Danser Sa Vie, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011); 2010: Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2010); While Bodies Get Mirrored. An Exhibition about Movement, Formalism and
 Space, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich (2010); and Dance with Camera, Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (2009). The recipient of a Louis Comfort Foundation Tiffany Award and a Performa Commission, Nipper’s work is in the public collections of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and The Israel Museum in Jerusalem, among others.