Krista Steinke Wins Jones Artist Award For ‘Sun Notations’ Video Project
Krista Leigh Steinke, assistant professor in Visualization, recently received the 2024 Jones Artist Award for her video “Sun Notations,” an experimental project about the sun.
The Jones Artist Award is presented by the Houston Endowment foundation. This year’s award recognizes artists who created work around the theme of time and memory as it relates to Houston’s history, culture, technology or natural environment.
“I was thrilled, really excited and honored to receive this award,” Steinke said.
Steinke’s piece was selected among 100 submissions and featured in “Nature’s Imprint,” a group exhibition curated by the Houston advisory firm The Weingarten Art Group. Steinke grew up in Houston and returned there in 2013. She started collecting images for this piece around 2015.
“When I moved back to Houston in 2013, my inclination was to create work about the landscape, but I kept pointing my camera upwards towards the sky,” Steinke said. “The sky is so big and vast, and the sun is a major character in the landscape here. It felt organic and natural to start making work about the sun, which is a constant presence in our life.”
To create “Sun Notations,” she began capturing the movement of the sun through pinhole images, which she said is the most primitive form of photography. She makes her own “pinhole cameras” out of small containers like cookie tins or aluminum cans.
Steinke pokes a hole in the container and places light-sensitive photographic paper inside the chamber. When the pinhole camera is exposed to the sun, the paper captures different shapes and forms as light moves through the hole, she said.
“I leave the pinhole cameras outside for an extended period, so over the course of time the cameras track the pathway of the sun rising and setting,” she said. “The lines in the images are an actual record of the sun moving across the sky.”
Most of the cameras have multiple pinholes poked in them, Steinke said. She often rotated the cameras daily by putting them in different positions. For the video, she scanned the light-sensitive paper and digitally animated where the lines begin and end.
“It is an animation of the pathway of the sun,” she said. “I embrace all of the weird light leaks and things that happen during the photographic process. When I scan the photos and reanimate them, I am, in essence, reinterpreting the photograph itself.”
Ashley Lane and Annie Sungkajun, two former Texas A&M students who earned graduate degrees in Visualization, assisted Steinke in the animation process. She said their skillsets and design sensibilities were a good match for the aesthetic direction of the piece.
Steinke said the sun often inspires her work, but acknowledged that living in Texas can complicate that relationship.
“The sun in Texas can be a welcome entity, like after a hurricane,” she said, “but can also be dreadful and relentless, like in the summer months. We have this dual relationship as the sun has the ability to create and give, but also to take away. So in ‘Sun Notations,’ there is this creation-and-destruction element to the piece.”
Steinke said her work “oscillates between realistic scenes and abstract moments,” which provides an opportunity for viewers to interpret the work for themselves.
“I like to encourage my audience to think about the sun and the physical world from a different perspective,” she said. “The piece speaks to the natural rhythms of time, while also suggesting that time marches on at its own pace, regardless of the speed at which our lives unfold.”
A sample clip of this work is available to view on Steinke’s website.
Photo courtesy of Nicki Evans Photo and The Weingarten Group.
