Amy Kaps: Interdisciplinary Artist

Amy Kaps creates across performance, music, film and video, shaped by a life spent in many countries and creative fields. Her practice fuses live action with multimedia, producing work that engages the senses and provokes both thought and emotion.

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Festival of M.A.R.S. graphic — Festival of M.A.R.S.

Background and Journey

Conceived in Columbus, Ohio, born in Brooklyn and brought up in suburban New Jersey, Amy studied in Upstate New York, Japan and Los Angeles, and has called Manhattan and Köln, Germany home. Today she lives and works in Venice, California.

Once she had earned a degree in Psychology, she headed back to New York City, assisting an art management consultant by day and performing as an artist, singer and club kid by night. A move to Germany followed, where she tested her limits and explored Europe's museums, concentrating on music and performance art while also working in radio and television journalism. She is equally proud of having learned to tap a keg of beer.

Thirteen years later she came back to the States and shifted her focus to film, which felt like the natural culmination of everything she had pursued before. Aware of her own limits, she enrolled in film school to acquire the technical grounding she was after.

Visual Vocabulary and Technique

As she learned to handle her video camera, Amy found a visual language born from both the subject and the way the camera is manipulated. Playing with exposure and in-camera digital effects, she created results that echo abstract impressionist paintings — dreamlike images the eye never encounters in real time and space.

A photograph freezes a moment in time, whereas video lets those moments move through time. She has used digital effects both in-camera and in post-production, interlacing and de-interlacing images and layering them so the world appears from a shifted perspective. What we see stays real, yet our perception is deliberately altered.

Every still frame holds its own time code, a precise mathematical point in time and space. She has also been known to appropriate existing imagery, heightening and reshaping its most striking features. What we see feels familiar, yet it invites us to reach into the subconscious to finish the picture. Ultimately, it is all about making beautiful images.

Performance, Film and Intention

Performance art and film come with almost no limits. Amy keeps merging live action with multimedia to make something of the present moment, touching every sense along with the emotional and psychological synapses. Her aim is to stimulate and provoke thought and feeling — and to spread beauty through the banal.

— Amy

Explore and Connect

Amy Kaps moves fluidly between live performance, music, film and video, treating each medium as another way to reshape how we perceive a moment. Her layered, in-camera and post-production effects turn ordinary scenes into dreamlike images that stay grounded in the real world. Explore the links above to follow her work or discover more artists featured by Festival of M.A.R.S.