Camille Utterback, Precarious. Photo by Jeff Malet, courtesy of the artist and Haines Gallery
ITP Alum Camille Utterback, as profiled in SFWeekly, opened 'Kleidoscope Eyes' at Haines Gallery and 'Re-Engineering Humanity' at 836M.
A middle-aged man is standing in front of Camille Utterback’s Precarious, and he’s waving both hands like a magician casting a spell. Next to him is a younger man who’s swaying his hands (and his body) like a Hawaiian hula dancer. Art-goers do the craziest things when they’re around Utterback’s interactive art — and that’s great by Utterback. Hell, she does it herself. She can’t help it. No one can.
Utterback makes art that responds to people’s movements — and then changes itself in front of their eyes, with new squiggles, new forms, and new movements that turn works like Precarious into living, breathing ecosystems. They’re abstract ecosystems — her new work skewing toward the artistic styles of de Kooning and Diebenkorn — but ecosystems nevertheless that relate to people and are run by software.
See more here.