Nathaniel Stern

 NATHANIEL STERN 

Nathaniel Stern is an experimental installation and video artist, net artist, printmaker, and writer. Presently, he is an Associate Professor of Art in University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Stern graduated from Cornell University with degree in design, studio-based Masters in art from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York City, United State of America, and written PhD from Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, and wrote a thesis on interactive art and embodiment.

 INTEREST 

Stern’s past studies of fashion design, slam poetry , and music had drawn his interest in the body and text relations and generally interpreted notions of performance and performativity, particularly related in body and embodiment. He states that his interactive work treats “the body and art as cooperative sites of potential resistance,” seeing them as mutable entities that "per-form" themselves in relation to their environments, rather than being extant and "pre-formed." Stern’s other work regularly attempts to bring his notions around performance, embodiment, time and interactivity to more traditional forms like sculpture, drawing and print by combining them with digital and interacted media.

 ARTWORKS AND EXHIBITIONS 

1. Stuttering

One of his interactive installation, ‘Stuttering’, anticipates a space which drawls how we influence, and are influenced by, conversation and conception. It advocates that motionlessness and tentative play a role in the uncertain aptitudes of memory and storytelling.

“Computer printouts are dispersed about the floor, comprising quotes and passages about stutterers, situations in which stuttering, in its widest sense, is collective, and ideas of when and where we should “make stutters”, in order to break “seamless” communication.” Each viewer in the space triggers a large-scale interactive art object anticipated on the wall in front them. This anticipation is broken into a Mondrian-like mirror, where each sub-section, initialized by body-tracking software, animates one of the floor-found quotes; every animation is accompanied by an audio recitation of its text.”



‘Stuttering’ hence produces an intense environment through its inexorable barrage of stuttering sound and visual stuttering noise. By decreasing their participation, will the information explosion slow into an understandable text for the spectator. The section asks the spectator not to interact, but merely to listen. Their minimal movements, and the phrases they trigger, literally create new significance.

The spaces between speaking and listening, between language and the body, add to the complex experience of communication. ‘Stuttering’ is not displaying data, but rather, pushing to explore these practices of speaking and listening. It suggests that communication comes to and from the participator, in ways that can’t be fully grasped.

2. Compressionist

The trope of compression is one that reinforces much in ages. Unlike reducing or editing, compressing implies not so much a loss of detail as a pulling together of information or matter so that it occupies a smaller space, digital or actual. The vital characteristic of the compressed part of information is not that it is necessarily substandard to the original/practical, but that the gradations of its detail are hidden, hermetically encoded into a language that re veals the inadequacies in the human’s sensory system. For some time Nathaniel Stern, an interesting and creative contest on the SA contemporary art scene, has been retaining the method of compression as a productive one through which images are created. More than a little ironic in orientation to the majesty which history of art discusses through its 'isms', Stern took to calling his creative process 'Compressionism'.



The discussions that radiate from this term are various, and are supported in Stern's work on 'Call and Response'. As the visual qualities of the works alter them towards a somewhat forceful concept, the inexorable association is with Abstract Expressionism, more specifically the gesticulation of Jackson Pollock's and Franz Kline's action painting. Yet Stern's choice of issue substance for this show also evokes the near-abstraction of the great Impressionist Claude Monet 's latter day output. As is well-documented, Monet's seemingly tireless fixation with water lilies and the surfaces they floated on occupied much of the last third of his career. Certain connections can be seen with these images and works of Stern's like Satin Bed 2006 and Emmarentia Lilies 2006.

3. Sentimental Construction



Titled ‘The Mist ’, the third sentimental construction, was assembled along with 51 collaborators from the SenseLab in the forests north of Montreal. Every assembly is an extensive, environmentally-conditioned intervention made of minimal materials and performed in public space. For the event, “ Generating the Impossible ”, the assemblage worked to re-conceive of what sentiments and constructions are, and how all of them might be presented and activated, together. The concluding environmental installation was approximately (45 x 6) meters of rope, rocks, mosquito netting, cable ties, pulleys and tape, all stretched across Mekoos Lake. Its form reacts to wind and light, and reflections and ripples in the water. Conditional on the time of day, and vicinity to The Mist, most travelled to it in boats. It waivers between seeming as a bridge, as haze, or as mirrored water from below. The Mist was later transported back to the city, and performed twice in Outremont, Montreal.

The first two sentimental constructions were publicly performed architectural structures made of rope. Each twists the idea of ‘public space’ by its double activation: first, through the volunteers who stretch its form outward and around them; and second, through the communal play of the onlookers-turned-participants, who give the structure other performativity turn. For Generating the Impossible, these were taken as an intention in form and concept, as brief measures that carve out space and frame their contexts. The Mist, like its predecessors, is ’sentimental’ in the tensions it creates between melancholy and probability, assembly and development, the pre-formed and the per-formed.

The (Incoming) list of N. Stern exhibitions:

Solo and Dua Exhibitions
2013 2011
 * Dynamic Stasis, in collaboration with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, Gallery AOP, Johannesburg
 * Giverny of the Midwest, solo exhibition, Gallery AOP, Johannesburg, South Africa
 * Made Real, duo exhibition with Scott Kildall, Furtherfield Gallery, London, United Kingdom


 * Mind the Gap, solo exhibition, Paul Watkins Gallery, Winona State University, Winona, MN

 Strange Vegetation, with Yevgeniya Kaganovich, Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum, Milwaukee, WI 
 * Printing Time, solo exhibition, Wharepuke Gallery, Kerikeri, New Zealand

2010
 * Falling Still, solo exhibition in collaboration with Yevgeniya Kaganovich, UWM Art History Gallery, Milwaukee, WI
 * Distill Life, solo exhibition in collaboration with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, Museum of Wisconsin Art, Milwaukee, WI


 * Print Press Play, solo exhibition in collaboration with with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, Elaine Erickson, Milwaukee, WI


 * Arrested Time, solo exhibition curated by Jo-Anne Green of turbulence.org, Greylock Arts, Adams, MA


 * Passing Between, solo exhibition, with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, Gallery AOP, Johannesburg, South Africa

2007
 * Landscapes & Icons, duo with Paul LaRocque, Haydn Shaughnessy Gallery, Cork, Ireland
 * Call and Response, solo exhibition, Gallery AOP, Johannesburg, South Africa

2006
 * Unseen Video, solo exhibition, Parking Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa
 * Time and Seeing, solo exhibition, Outlet gallery, Pretoria, South Africa

2005
 * experiment02, duo with Marcus Neustetter, Franchise gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa
 * enter:hektor, solo exhibition, Klein Karoo National Arts Festival, Oudtshoorn, South Africa

2004 - 2005 2004
 * the storytellers, solo exhibition, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa
 * The GetAway Experiment, duo with Marcus Neustetter, ArtSpace Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa
 * eat, solo video-poetry installation / exhibition, Outlet gallery, Pretoria, South Africa

2003 2002
 * Wits School Of Arts launch, solo installation in the substation gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa
 * New Media Room featured artist, solo installation, Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, NY