Kelly Nipper
Kelly Nipper is an artist who “uses choreography to shape [her] ideas about space and time and weather and emotions.” She works with videos, installations, and live performances to explore the moving human form through deliberate, ritualized gestures. Nipper often integrates detailed notation systems and vocal directives with choreography and repetitive movements. For example, Weather Center is closely based on German Expressionist choreographer Mary Wigman’s solo Witch Dance, first performed by Wigman in Munich in 1914. Wearing a mask that obscures her face, the dancer in Nipper’s video enacts highly charged movements that resemble weather patterns, while a voice-over counts from one to ten.
Nipper's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland, Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland, and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. Her performances have been commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland, South London Gallery, UK, and Performa, New York. Nipper's work has been included in recent significant exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, Switzerland, and the Institute for Contemporary …
Kelly Nipper is an artist who “uses choreography to shape [her] ideas about space and time and weather and emotions.” She works with videos, installations, and live performances to explore the moving human form through deliberate, ritualized gestures. Nipper often integrates detailed notation systems and vocal directives with choreography and repetitive movements. For example, Weather Center is closely based on German Expressionist choreographer Mary Wigman’s solo Witch Dance, first performed by Wigman in Munich in 1914. Wearing a mask that obscures her face, the dancer in Nipper’s video enacts highly charged movements that resemble weather patterns, while a voice-over counts from one to ten.
Nipper's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland, Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland, and the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. Her performances have been commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland, South London Gallery, UK, and Performa, New York. Nipper's work has been included in recent significant exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, Switzerland, and the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia. Currently she is a lecturer in the program Art, Culture and Technology in the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT.
Courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art
