A Selection from the Hammer Contemporary Collection: Katie Grinnan

Katie Grinnan uses sculpture, photography, sound, and video to explore the relationship between our visual and kinesthetic experience and our resulting interpretation of space. To make Mirage, Grinnan cast multiple molds of her body executing a sun salutation, a sequence of hatha yoga postures, or asanas, that are typically repeated in a rising and falling, undulating motion. Resembling a multiarmed Hindu deity, Mirage describes the full extent of the body’s peripersonal space. Dependent upon context, the space within our personal boundaries is constantly changing, directly impacting our perception of reality. This subjective experience of space and time is at the core of Mirage: the work translates a specific movement into a static object, compressing linear time in a manner that recalls the principle of quantum superposition, which holds that a physical system exists in all its possible states simultaneously but can be observed in only one state at a time.