Walking Away (Water Ceremony), 2022, still from video, print on metal

Kimberlee Koym-Murteira

Nov 29, 2022

Interview conducted by Kate Mothes for wethemuse.art

Kimberlee Koym-Murteira is an Oakland-based multimedia artist who centres her practice on ideas of embodiment and physical presence in the world. Relationships between ourselves and nature, the space around us, the time of day, momentous events, and the seasons are captured in a range of video, sculpture, dance, installation, and music. She often collaborates with artists and performers who focus on meditation and healing practices, and as a teacher, works with students to envision ways that art can translate physical, emotional, and spiritual experience into new ways of seeing. Independent curator and WTM mentor Kate Mothes met with Koym-Murteira in November on Zoom to discuss ideas around perception, presence, memory, and her most recent project Unseen to Seen, which collaboratively explored responses to the pandemic.

Kate Mothes: There's a lot of research that goes into your work. And probably, I'm assuming from teaching, there's an element of constantly gleaning information as you’re working with students.

Kimberlee Koym-Murteira: I actually did a lot of the [plaster] casting and different things with students for the Unseen to Seen project. So that was a chance to break my practice into my teaching, which I've been trying to do more and more.

The framework [of my practice] is really the idea of embodiment, like, how are we physically present? That arches over like everything. In our emails, you were asking about the perception. And perception is actually like an embodiment tool. I really think that a lot of us become artists because we need a meditation system. And art, for me, it's like a moving meditation system.

Anyway, I got to teach this embodiment art class and did some of the practices that I’d just done by myself, but with a larger group. So I see that's kind of a thing that I would like my practice to grow into: getting to do kind of social art practice with larger groups, like doing body-casting or different embodiment practices. That's all very art-related. You know, ‘Is that embodiment?’

Shadow Gesture, 2022, interactive projection

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