Rippling Images

In my ongoing series of “Compressionism” prints, I strap a desktop scanner, computing device and custom battery pack to my body, and perform images into existence. I might scan in straight, long lines across tables, tie the scanner around my neck and swing over flowers, do pogo-like gestures over bricks, or just follow the wind over water lilies in a pond. The dynamism between my body, technology, and the landscape is transformed into beautiful and quirky renderings, which are then produced as archival artworks.

For Rippling Images, I worked with a team to produce a marine-rated scanner rig, including custom hard- and software, and performed a new series of digital works while scuba diving on a live coral reef off the coast of Key Largo in Florida. My goal was an exhibition where where site and technology – their limitations, possibilities and potentials – take greater agency in the constitution and construction of printed forms. My movements underwater, my relations to life and gravity, what I see and cannot see, fish and plants, breathing and fluidity, all affect and are affected in and as these images, being made.

 

nathanielstern_underwaterEverything leaked, everything broke, nothing did what I wanted or expected: and this is precisely what must have happened to finally see the 18 wondrous prints that premiered when I was the featured artist at the Turbine Art Fair, Johannesburg in July 2014, and as a solo show at Tory Folliard in Milwaukee, WI in October of the same year. This work has been produced with support from the UWM Graduate School.

At stake are not only the ways we perform our bodies, media, concepts and materials, but also the implications of water and land, life and non-life, that we perform with every day: as individuals, as a people, and as a part of our habitats.