Kelly Nipper’s practice engages lens-based technologies that, through the application of pressure, transform motion, figure, and space. Her work explores the dynamic interplay of scale, form, and proximity within time-based media. She integrates dance practices informed by scientific principles, viewing the human body as a technology rather than an expressive identity. Circling dystopia—orbiting its periphery without confronting its core—her work maps the body through technology and geography to understand how to spatialize time. This broader strategy of imagining the possibilities of time stems from the idea that a single condition or environment can endlessly fracture itself into different shapes and forms.

At the intersection of photography’s historical connections to physiology, the occult, geology, and the social sciences, her work investigates the morphology of the medium. Through this exploration, she engages with the broader implications of movement analysis, communication theory, and climate change’s de-accelerated shifts in weather patterns and temperatures that are structuring the destruction of everything.

Since the mid-1990s, Nipper’s work with dancers has focused on Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analysis (LBMA). She equates this system with other open, closed, or isolated structures—such as weaving, counting, the spatial logics of architecture, and photography—that have been integral to the development of mechanical computers and the evolution of computer science and design. This constellation of systems offers a conceptual framework for her approach, positioning movement as both code and form, and the body as a site where spatial and temporal architectures converge.

Over several years, her collaborations with dance artist Taisha Paggett, dancer Marissa Ruazol, and LBMA instructors Ed Groff, Theresa Heiland, Sarah Leddy, and Liz Maxwell have shaped a grammar-based language that transcends disciplinary boundaries. This evolving lexicon merges dance with optical machinery and esoteric practices, and sometimes materializes in forms such as collage, sculpture, and typography.

Nipper’s work has been the subject of solo presentations at The Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthaus Zürich, Hammer Museum, South London Gallery, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, and Tramway. She received the 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 2007. Selected group exhibitions include Motion Capture: Recent Acquisitions in Media and Performance, Walker Art Center; Global Groove: Art, Dance, Performance and Protest, Museum Folkwang; Danser Sa Vie, Centre Pompidou; and 2010: Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum. Her work is in the public collections of the Migros Museum, Hammer Museum, Walker Art Center, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Orange County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, among others. Nipper lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.