kilman kity from Kimberlee Koym-Murteira on Vimeo.

VIRGINIA’S MOVING BLUE HOUSE 2003

MISSION 17: SAN FRANCISCO, CA

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Kimberlee draws upon her past work in theater and film to construct physical interiorities, which allow her to explore psychological tensions and the dynamics of domestic life. For the show at MISSION 17, she installed video monitors on a painted chair and in a painted sideboard respectively, and hung them on a wall. The piece was called, “Virginia’s Moving Blue House,” and was inspired by Virginia Wolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. The strength of the installation came from Kimberlee’s use of diverse media in a clearly focused and defined study. She excerpted text from Virginia Wolf’s novel, employed live actors along side animation constructed with still images, and situated her video on a set. This layering of media enabled Kimberlee to construct a rich, sense of subjective interiority (akin to the stream of consciousness writing that inspired the project), while simultaneously it extended the interiority on the video-screens to include the space her audience already occupied – i.e., the room presented in the gallery along with the room represented on the monitors.
While Kimberlee works primarily with moving images, her art is heavily indebted to still collage and, at times, is more reminiscent of Romare Bearden or Robert Rauschenberg than the work of other video-artists. Her use of both animation and live action footage in “Virginia’s Moving Blue House,” enabled Kimberlee to present multiple perspectives on her characters, and productively to confuse the boundaries between the real and the fantastical, along with the internal and external. The combination of both live-action and cut-and-paste techniques also contributes to Kimberlee’s study of movement and time, by interrupting the flow of the moving image with static, mechanical, and syncopated elements.

Statement by Clark Buckner, Director of Mission 17