Scott Kildall & Nathaniel Stern @ Furtherfield

MADE REAL
an exhibition by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, the founders of Wikipedia Art.

Private View: Thursday 26 May 2011, 6.30-9pm
Unit A2, Arena Design Centre, 71 Ashfield Rd, London N4 1NY

Networks – social, political, physical and digital – are a defining feature of contemporary life, yet their forms and operations often go unseen and unnoticed. For this exhibition Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, artists and co-founders of Wikipedia Art take these networks as their artistic materials and play-spaces to create artworks about love, power-play and a new social reality.

Three works are shown for the first time in the UK: Wikipedia Art, a collaborative work “made” of dialogue and social activity; Given Time, an Internet artwork that creates a feedback loop across virtual and actual space; and Playing Duchamp, a one-on-one meeting and game between an absent artist and viewer/participant.

Contact Alessandra Scapin ale[at]furtherfield[dot]org +44 (0) 2088022827
Free admission to exhibition and events

Wikipedia Art by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern

‘if you claim something to be true and enough people agree with you, it becomes true.’ Steve Colbert on Wikiality

‘I now pronounce Wikipedia Art … It’s alive! Alive!’ Kildall and Stern

Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern famously used Wikipedia as an artistic platform, creating a collaborative project that explores and challenges our understanding of how knowledge is formed and disseminated. For over a year they planned the initiation of Wikipedia Art, a socially generated artwork that exploits a feedback loop in Wikipedia’s citation mechanism. Here, a “word war” across blogs, interviews and the mainstream press, which involved Wikipedians, artists, journalists, lawyers and even the Wikimedia Foundation itself, continuously defined and transformed a work of art in much the same way that these categories define the discourses of the everyday.

This is not Wikipedia, oil on canvas?, 2010, – Wikipedia Art Remix by Patrick Lichty

‘We ask our potential collaborators – online communities of bloggers, artists and instigators – to exploit the shortcomings of the Wiki through performance.’ Kildall and Stern

(Often unwitting) collaborators ‘performed’ the work through a debate about its aesthetic, conceptual and legal legitimacy in over 300 texts in over 15 languages on the Internet via blogs and forums such as Rhizome and Slashdot, and in the press including the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian UK.

This exhibition charts the inception, birth, life, death and resurrection of Wikipedia Art, which questions the authoritative role of Wikipedia, and reveals its fallibility whilst debating the control of access to and creation of knowledge.

Wikipedia Art featured in the Internet Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2009. In 2011 it was an awarded finalist at the Transmediale festival in Berlin.

Also showing in this exhibition

Given Time by Nathaniel Stern
Furtherfield presents Stern’s polar projections of Second Life lovers. Second life is a 3D simulated and virtual world, inhabited daily by thousands of people around the globe. To access Second Life, you must embody an avatar (a virtual human representation of yourself), seeing what they see through a computer screen. Stern places us, and his lovers, in a feedback loop between virtual and actual space.

In Given Time, two life-sized and hand-drawn avatars simultaneously stare longingly across their virtual pond, and the real world gallery floor. They hover in mid-air, almost completely still, supported by the gentle sounds of their breath, the wind blowing, and birds in the far off distance. The viewer is both the observer and participant of this reciprocal relationship. Through the bodies and eyes of another, we see, look and are seen. Stern says: “Here, an intimate exchange between dual, virtual bodies is transformed into a public meditation on human relationships, bodily mortality, and time’s inevitable flow.”

Playing Duchamp by Scott Kildall

The American artist Scott Kildall, exhibiting for the first time in the UK, has fused the two worlds of art and chess in an homage to Marcel Duchamp, chess master and artist recognised for shifting the paradigm of conceptual art. Using the recorded matches of Duchamp’s 72 tournament games, Kildall has modified an open source chess engine to play chess as if it were Marcel Duchamp. By sitting down to this game of computer chess, visitors interact with the ghost of Marcel Duchamp, whose love for chess rivaled his attraction to art.

Furtherfield invites you to come and play because as Duchamp said: “The creative act is not performed by the artists alone”.

Events

Going the distance for fine dining with global friends
To accompany this exhibition, in June, Furtherfield will be hosting two telematic dinner parties with the aim to create a co-presence dining experience with our remote friends mediated by digital technologies (network connections, projections, laptops and sonified objects). As food is the greatest mediator, we aspire to a satisfying remote connection through the frame of the dining experience.
Contact ale[at]furtherfield[dot]org for details on how to become a dinner guest.

About the Artists

Scott Kildall
Scott Kildall is cross-disciplinary artist working with video, installation, prints, sculpture and performance. He gathers material from the public realm to perform interventions into various concepts of space.

Scott has a Bachelor of Arts in Political Philosophy from Brown University and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago through the Art & Technology Studies Department. He has exhibited his work internationally in galleries and museums and received fellowships, awards and residencies from organisations including the Kala Art Institute, The Banff Centre for the Arts, Turbulence.org and Eyebeam Art + Technology Center.

Scott is a founding member of Second Front — the first performance art group in Second Life. He is an artist-in-residence at Recology San Francisco. He currently resides in San Francisco.

More information: www.kildall.com

Nathaniel Stern
Nathaniel Stern (USA / South Africa) is an experimental installation and video artist, net.artist, printmaker and writer. He has produced and collaborated on projects ranging from interactive and immersive environments, mixed reality art and multimedia physical theatre performances, to digital and traditional printmaking, concrete sculpture and slam poetry.

Nathaniel has held solo exhibitions at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johnson Museum of Art, Museum of Wisconsin Art, University of the Witwatersrand, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and several commercial and experimental galleries throughout the US, South Africa and Europe. His work has been shown at festivals, galleries and museums internationally, including the Venice Biennale, Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art, International Symposium for Electronic Art, Transmediale, South African National Gallery, International Print Center New York, Milwaukee Art Museum and more. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee.

More information: http://nathanielstern.com

Download Wikipedia Art: Citation as Performative Act (Creative Commons licensed)
by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, to be included as a chapter in ’ Wikipedia: Critical Point of View. Eds. Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures (University of Amsterdam), 2011. Forthcoming. Print.

Furtherfield, Unit A2, Arena Design Centre, 71 Ashfield Rd, London N4 1NY, +44 (0) 2088022827
Free admission to exhibition and events -contact Alessandra Scapin ale[at]furtherfield[dot]org

Experimental installation/video and net artist, Nathaniel Stern Lecture, Wednesday, March 30, 4:30 pm in the Mark A. Chapman Gallery, Willard Hall, Kansas State University

Nathaniel Stern, Stuttering, interactive installation, size variable, 2003 / 2009

MANHATTAN —Kansas State University Department of Art will present a lecture by internationally recognized experimental installation and video artist, net.artist, printmaker and writer Nathaniel Stern, March 30, 4:30 pm in the Mark A. Chapman Gallery, Department of Art, Willard Hall on Kansas State University campus.

Admission is free and open to the public.

read more

I skipped a year, so it’s been 2 since I posted my surprisingly popular Tops of 2008: A Different Kind of Year in Review. Here, I go with four different Top 5 lists: The Top 5 people I newly met in 2010, The Top 5 people I’d like to meet because of what they did (or the work I saw from them) in 2010, The Top 5 exhibitions for me (what I found most enjoyable), and The Top 5 shows I wish I had seen, but didn’t. Hope you like it! Feel free to comment, leaving any things/people I missed but might (or should have) enjoy(ed)!

The Top 5 people I newly met in 2010:

1. Erin Manning + Brian Massumi. I know, although partnered, these are two very different people, and it’s probably wrong of me to put them together under one heading. But I met them together, have only seen them together, and it’s kind of fun, given that Brian has been an academic crush of mine for many years (one of the “like to meets” of 2008) and Erin is a new discovery who I am utterly enamored with. Both brilliant thinkers, both extremely generous spirits, both creative and funny and easy to hang with. I know I’ll be reading and citing and dialog-ing with them professionally for some time to come, and I hope our meeting is a long-time friendship in the making.
2. Mary Louise Schumacher at the Journal Sentinel. Mary Louise is part of a dying breed – a full-time arts critic at a daily newspaper. Not content to merely cover art in Milwaukee and its surrounds, Schumacher has gone to great efforts to put together a team of writers, both paid and volunteer, who engage with the community through her blog and regular print column. Like all good arts community-builders, she sees critics, artists, academics, gallerists and appreciators (extant or potential) as playing for the same team; but her courage and integrity in trying make shit happen with that? Very rare. ML: I owe you one martini.
3. Norah Zuniga Shaw (@ OSU, and Synchronous Objects, the project I met her through). A recipient of one of ISEA‘s commissions for 2010, Norah Zuniga Shaw is a brilliant artist and choreographer who studies, and asks us to re-examine, movement and stasis: in objects, ourselves, our surroundings, and more. If you’ll forgive the pun, her Synchronous Objects collaboration was very, um, moving. Also? Both she and her work are super fun.
4. Richard Grusin. The new Director of the Center for 21st Century Studies at UW-Milwaukee, author of this classic book and this new one, and fun to have a beer with. Honest and opinionated, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
5. Steven Sacks of Bitforms Gallery. A visionary in his approach to contemporary media art, the commercial gallery scene, and his blending of the two, several of my favorite artists working in digital domains show with Steven. Off the top of my head, I know he’s shown Yael Kanarek, Danny Rozin and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer this year, and currently has Daniel Canogar’s first NYC solo on exhibit.

Top 5 people I’d like to meet because of what they did (or the work I saw from them) in 2010:

1. Kate Mondloch, author of the book, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art published by University of Minnesota Press. I wrote a very positive review of this book for Rhizome.
2. Joseph Delappe. Brilliant media artist with a long history of engaging with technology and the social practices it influences. One of very few contemporary practitioners I know of that can pull off conceptual mixed reality work that is both implicitly and explicitly political,, beautiful and smart. He will be moving to the “people I’ve met” list in 2012!
3. Richard Noyce, curator and writer, author of Critical Mass: Printmaking Beyond the Edge. We’re hosting him here at UWM in the Spring, another one from my list(!)….
4. Anna Münster, curator, artist, writer – finally got around to reading Materializing New Media, and was super impressed.
5. Patricia Briggs. My newest guilty pleasure is urban fantasy, and my favorite character from the genre is definitely the were-coyote (sort of, Briggs calls her a “walker”) and mechanic, Mery Thompson (ha, Volkswagen mechanic named Mercedes!). Although it’s unlikely I’d meet the former, it’s impossible I’ll meet the latter (being fictional and all), so Patricia makes the list.
6. BONUS PERSON: as of last night, December 10th, Bernie Sanders!

The Top 5 exhibitions for me (what I found most enjoyable):

1. ISEA 2010! The 16th International Symposium on Electronic Art in the RUHR Region of Germany was probably the highlight of my year. Great art, conference, music, conversations, new friends, food, beer and more. I’m totally on board for future ISEAs now as well (see, for example, my name here).
2. Theatrical Properties at Bitforms Gallery. Co-curated by Emily Bates and Laura Blereau, with brochure essay by Sarah Cook, this exhibition turned everyday objects into kinetic props for really interesting narratives. Totally loved it and the great brochure.
3. Claude Monet, Gagosian Gallery. His late work just blew me away. I wish the catalog didn’t cost three times as much as one of my students’ works. I wish I had seven of these (and now I don’t mean the catalogs).
4. Real Postcard Survey Project at the Portrait Society Gallery in Milwaukee. See what I wrote about it in the Journal Sentinel.
5. Passing Between. Yes, I know, it’s cheeky to include my own show. But I’m not putting it forward because I want to convince you of its brilliance. Rather, I want to reiterate how much I love working with Gallery AOP in Johannesburg and with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger, my collaborator in Milwaukee, as well as the brilliant folks who helped us produce the catalog and work: Nicole Ridgway with her essay, Sean Kafer and his video documentary, Michael Spzakowski and his music, Jeff Ganger and his design, and of course my former studio assistants for all their help: Jesse Egan, Garrett Gharibeh and Bryan Cera.

The Top 5 shows I wish I had seen, but didn’t

1. Colleen Alborough’s Balance at the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg. A former student, good friend and great artist, Colleen’s show feels like it is both the culmination of years’ worth of work, as well as the beginning of a fantastic exploration of ideas and materials. Her work is smart, moving, and very well made.
2. #class. I never publicly commented on this. Actually, I’m not sure I’ve spoken to anyone about it, a fave of Jerry Saltz and an ongoing project with #rank. On the one hand, I am very very fond of artists trying to make a community, and make sense of how we engage with museums, the gallery scene, the public, etc. On the other, I tend to shy away from art about the art world – I just don’t find much of it that interesting. Often, however, I do like the work of Jennifer Dalton and Bill Powhida (the people behind this project), so I withheld judgment until now. And I’m glad I did; in fact I sometimes wish I had tried to be involved myself – it’s a great project. I’ll say I’m especially fond of the collaborators’ reflections on their work, and find many of the interviews and blog posts with and by them to be curious and provocative, personal and intelligent, funny and entertaining, and full of gems that critically analyze not just the art scene, but all the roles played in it, including their own.
3. William Kentridge’s Nose. I had the privelege of seeing much of William’s design work in progress for the Nose in his studio in South Africa; I also consulted on a derivative piece from his last opera for him; and I even saw the launch of the Nose print suite at David Krut in Joburg. But I’m yet to see one of the Kentridge performances myself! I find William to be smart, generous and thoughtful, as both artist and person – and his prolific work is brilliant. He’s kind of my hero. And so it pisses me off that I’m yet to see either of his operas.
4. Art Basel Miami. The work of Jennifer Dalton and Bill Powhida, and some chats with my friend Heather Warren-Crow (among others), have lead me to believe that Art Basel Miami is kind of insane. Paradoxically wonderful and horrible, commercial and interventionist, low-brow party wrapped in high-brow culture, I’m not interested in intervening or even participating – I just wanna go one year, and get drunk a lot.
5. David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly. Not a show in itself, and not new, but a bit of recent controversy in the press has made the public again aware of what I hear is a stunning and heartbreaking work.

I’m sure I missed plenty, but that’s what I have off the top of my head. Enjoy the holiday season!

Falling Still

Yevgeniya Kaganovich and Nathaniel Stern
UWM Art History Gallery
curated by Jennifer Johung
2 December – 16 December 2010
opening reception 2 December, 5 – 7 PM
the artists will be in attendance at the opening
the exhibition has an accompanying booklet with text by the curator

Falling Still utilizes 200 cement-cast feathers as individual pixels to create a larger image across 6 planes. Each of these sculptures has been hand-poured into molds of actual feathers, exhibiting finely detailed quills on one side, and flat concrete surfaces on the other. They hang from the ceiling via discrete fishing lines, swinging, twisting and turning as viewers move around the 8 x 15 x 4 foot installation area. From all perspectives but one, the work floats between 1-dimensional lines, 2-dimensional planes and 3-dimensional pixels. View it exactly perpendicular to its planes, and all the work’s elements cohere into a bit-mapped image of a body, leaping through the air. While Falling Still is itself suspended between movement and stasis, it also moves and arrests us. The installation directs us in and around incongruous objects, through an improbable image, and across multiple dimensions.

http://yevgeniyakaganovich.com
http://nathanielstern.com
http://johung.com

University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee Art History Gallery
154 Mitchell Hall
3203 North Downer Avenue
Milwaukee, WI 53211
Mon – Thurs: 10am-4pm

The gallery is free, open to the public and handicap accessible.
For more information, contact Jennifer Johung, johung@uwm.edu

New Work with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger! It’s a one-of-a-kind charcoal and pastel drawing on paper, permanently mounted to an LCD screen playing machinima video from Second Life. Part of the ongoing Distill Life series, the image tells only part of the story. The earth’s rotation in the video is a time lapse, with a moonset and sunset over 5 minutes, but the clouds and sea and rain (and blinking lights, etc) move in real time. Made especially for a group show with our gallery in South Africa, Gallery AOP, opening late October.

Switch & Signal
charcoal, pastel, LCD with machinima video
9 x 12 inches, 2010
Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Nathaniel Stern

For Sean Fletcher and Isabel Reichert’s Wikipedia Art Remix, two actors perform a scene appropriated from Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”.  The dialogue between the iconic characters George and Martha incorporates highlights from the “Articles for Deletion” page of Wikipedia Art, an intervention by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern on Wikipedia, so the couple’s argument becomes one about whether or not art can exist on Wikipedia.

See a video art version of this upcoming performance piece.

Sean Fletcher and Isabel Reichert have collaborated together on conceptually based performance works, interventions, writings, installations, videos, photography, and prints since meeting each other in 1994.  Their work is about power and vulnerability; how it relates to relationship dynamics, society, and politics. Fletcher and Reichert use collaboration as a tool to integrate the negotiation for power into works of art.

Scott Kildall is an independent artist, who intervenes with objects and actions into various concepts of space. Nathaniel Stern is an artist, teacher, writer and provocateur, who works with interactive, participatory, networked and traditional forms.

Art is always dialogical – I mean, simply, that it is in dialogue: with history, with other art and artists, with current events, with politics and pop culture and more. Most of all, it is in dialogue with people, with real people.

This is not the same as the en masse, people-powered internet – the democratic, vote yes or no, argue over at Wikipedia, digg this, intelligence of crowds we keep hearing about.

Because while I like LOLcats as much as the next guy, I’m interested in more depth.

I’m interested in people speaking to one another on a personal level, working together to create and change ideas, to make things, and to make things different.

I believe in the artist as public figure, as both engaging and engaged; because the only thing I appreciate as much as a beautiful and provocative work of art, is the discussion that can grow out of one.

Given that, I also believe that generosity is key to contemporary practices of art. If art is a conversation, you gotta make people want to talk to you; you gotta be nice, you gotta ask questions, you have to not only be interesting, but interested – in other work and what others say and do.

I believe in chit chat, in discourse, in studio critique, in humanity; I believe in art karma, in goin’ around and comin’ around, in sending folks to see things and meet people, and in sharing my tricks and my code and myself.

Teaching is a part of my practice, and a part of my work. Writing is a part of my practice and a part of my work. Collaborating is always implicit in what I do, and often explicit towards the end of a given piece.

I like to make and share and talk about stuff, and I like people who do said same.

I speak back to artists who came before, and converse with my peers about what we’re all trying to do. I hope others want to do the same, want to be in dialogue with what I do and make and say.

For me, generosity is essential to the contemporary practice of making art….

- slightly edited introduction to my artist talk, posted by request. the slide images I usually show are also fun, but in blog form (as opposed to live performance) they took away from, rather than added to, the text. comments welcome.

compressionism.net

Just finished an overhaul of compressionism.net, and uploaded content, including works, press, documentaiton, etc. Look out for upcoming books and shows that feature the new work!

Humorous and surprising, smart and provocative, Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media (MIT Press, 2010) jumps from opposing viewpoints to opposing personalities, from one arts trajectory to another. The entire book is a dialectic exercise: none of its problems or theories are solved or concluded, but are rather complicated through revelations around their origins, arguments and appropriations. Overall, the book adopts the collaborative style and hyperlinked approach of the media and practice it purports to rethink. In other words, it is not just the content of the book that asks us to rethink curating, but the reading itself; by the end, we are forced to digest and internalize the consistently problematized behaviors of the “media formerly known as new.”

Sarah Cook and Beryl Graham, co-editors of the CRUMB site and list (the Curatorial Resource for Upstart Media Bliss), have co-authored the book via email and on a Wiki, and assert outright that it is not a “theory book”; its structure instead “reflects the CRUMB approach to research, which discusses and analyzes the process of how things are done” (12). The sheer number of examples, citations, and first-person accounts in this nearly 350-page volume make it so that every time the trajectory coheres into a singular point or argument, it is then broken up again, into a constellation of ideas that make us rethink, again. We are issued challenge after challenge to our assumptions about media, our understandings of curatorial practice, and our opinions about the spaces in which we exhibit art. It is only after an exhaustive study of seemingly irreconcilable philosophies, practices and venues, the book implicitly argues, that we can begin to engage with what needs to be rethought, and how to do so.

Rethinking Curating makes three basic arguments. First, that one must approach a broad set of histories in trying to understand any given artwork, and “for new media art this set includes technological histories, which are essentially interdisciplinary and patchily documented” (283). Second, that such broad histories have led to the unique development of “critical vocabularies for the fluid and overlapping characteristics of new media art” (283). Cook and Graham reason that new media are best understood not as materials but as “behaviors” – participatory, performative or generative, for example. And third, that these behaviors demand a rethinking of curating, new modes of “looking at the production, exhibition, interpretation, and wider dissemination (including collection and conservation) of new media art” (1).

Read the whole article

Cover of Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art by Kate Mondloch

Kate Mondloch’s first book, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art, is a welcome study of the cathode ray tubes, liquid crystal and plasma displays, and film, video and data projections that “pervade contemporary life” (xi). The author reminds us that screens are not just “illusionist windows” into other spaces or worlds, but also “physical, material entities [that] beckon, provoke, separate, and seduce” (xii). Most importantly, however, Mondloch’s approach is that of an art historian. She does not merely use art as a case study for media theory, but rather makes the contributions of artists her central focus in this, the first in-depth study of the space between bodies and screens in contemporary art.

Like Nicolas Bourriaud in his Relational Aesthetics, Mondloch begins in the gallery space, and is interested in creating a “discrete critical framework” (63) for a specific genre: what she calls “screen-reliant” art. Mondloch recognizes the import of “viewing subjects” engaging with “actual art objects” (xii – xiii) and attempts to apply a combination of post-structural theory and phenomenology to her study. Here she describes the relationships between virtual and actual, sign and material, involving the theories and philosophies of Lacan and Deleuze on the mirror stage and cinema, for example, but always including the screen’s inherent materiality in how art is experienced.

Chapter 1, “Interface Matters,” describes in detail Mondloch’s category of screen-reliant installation art, looking to the work of Paul Sharits and Michael Snow as examples of how artists of the 1960s were, for the first time, investigating the interface of the screen itself: “the multifarious physical and conceptual points at which the observing subject meets the media object” (2). Here she goes to great lengths to remember the differences between screenings of film, and screens in film and video installation. The latter are hybridized as spatial and temporal, akin to Minimalism in their approach to the body, but with the potential for entwined and confused narratives as the timeline of its materials unfold. Mondloch’s reading of Snow’s Two Sides to Every Story is especially poignant.

Read more…

“Bad at Sports is a weekly podcast produced in Chicago that features artists talking about art and the community that makes, reviews and critiques it. Shows are usually posted each weekend and can be listened to on any computer with an internet connection and speakers or headphones.”

This audio interview (available streaming from the site, or as a download to your computer or mp3 player) begins with Nathaniel Stern rapping a bit of Beastie Boys / Q-Tip, and quickly degrades to him lovingly poking fun at his dad. It’s actually a great interview, where you can hear some off the cuff chatting with Duncan MacKenzie about hektor.net, Distill Life, Compressionism, Wikipedia Art, Given Time, Doin’ my part to lighten the load, and more. It’s good fun, with lots of tangential stories and jokes, and many mentions of good friends and colleagues. Enjoy!

listen to interview on B@S

Two in Wisconsin, and more!

It’s been a busy few months for Nathaniel Stern (me), and there’s more to come. My show with Jessica Meuninck-Ganger at Gallery AOP in Johannesburg has received critical acclaim in the Mail and Guardian and on Rhizome.org (among others), and the exhibition at Greylock Arts (extended for another two weeks – see documentation here) featured in the North Adams Transcript, and will be discussed at length in an upcoming episode of Bad at Sports. Current group shows, and openings in the next few weeks, also include other spaces in Chicago, Johannesburg, Hungary and Milwaukee. See my web site for more.

The big and exciting news is our homecoming: two solo shows of the Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meunink-Ganger collaborations open this week in Wisconsin – and the catalogue (with DVDs) from Gallery AOP will be available. You can see the cover of “Cue” in today’s Journal Sentinel for a feature and image.

Distill Life

Museum of Wisconsin Art
Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger
Wednesday 5 April 2010 – Saturday 8 May 2010

Opening Sunday 11 April 2010, 1:30 PM
Featuring a talk and demonstration by the artists at 2 PM

*

Print Press Play

Elaine Erickson Gallery
Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger
Thursday 8 April 2010 – Saturday 22 May 2010

Opening Thursday 8 April 2010, from 6 – 8 PM
Featuring a talk by the artists at 6:30 PM

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About the work

Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Nathaniel Stern approach both old and new media as form. In their “Distill Life” works, the artists permanently mount translucent prints and drawings directly on top of video screens, creating moving images on paper. They incorporate technologies and aesthetics from traditional printmaking – including woodblock, silk screen, etching, lithography, photogravure etc – with the technologies and aesthetics of contemporary digital, video and networked art, to explore images as multidimensional.

Meuninck-Ganger and Stern hack and tweak, shoot and print, appropriate and remix, edit and draw. Their juxtaposition of anachronistic and disparate methods, materials and content -print and video, paper and electronics, real and virtual – enables novel approaches to understanding each. The artists engage with subject matter ranging from historical portraiture to current events, from hyperreal landscapes to socially awkward moments. The works are surprising, wistful, enchanting, and seriously playful.

http://nathanielstern.com
http://jessicameuninck.com

“This past month, Johannesburg’s AOP Gallery, a space devoted to works on paper, hosted the exhibition “Passing Between” which showcased the collaborative output between digital artist Nathaniel Stern and printmaker Jessica Meuninck-Ganger. At the outset, Stern and Meuninck-Ganger approached the collaboration as a chance to learn each other’s techniques. But they quickly chose to focus on their own strengths in a process they call [Distill Life]. For Stern, the move toward printmaking comes from a long interest in the technique. In recent work, he has engaged with an expanded form of digital print making, using a hacked portable scanner to produce densely patterned sequences of natural images, in a project called Compressionism. For “Passing Between,” Stern concentrated on using digital photo frames as a medium for displaying loops of video obtained through live filming, and sampled machinima taken from Second Life. Meuninck-Ganger responded to the framed video loops with an encyclopedic range of printmaking techniques from wood block to mono print, silkscreen, etching, and photogravure. In some cases, she printed or [drew] directly on the screens of the digital photo frames; in other cases, the prints were layered over the screens creating a delicate conjunction between the fibers of the paper medium and the illumination of the underlying video. In The Gallerist, a prominent New York art dealer is portrayed anxiously perched on a [raft] in [the] middle of a lithograph while below the surface of the paper machinima sharks circle him endlessly.”

“The effect is both magical and subtle. Jessica’s images often capture a static moment from the subject matter of the video in etching or ink. The pleasure offered by the composite images comes from the interplay between the stasis of the printed image and the temporal flow of the video, producing witty and sometimes fascinating results. In the diptych [Twin City] the 2009 tornado is represented with an animated twister from Second Life. Jessica’s lithograph shows a flying pig coming to rest momentarily in alignment with its outline before whirling back to the beginning of the looped tornado. In general, the artist’s subject matter is deliberately low-key and it presents samples from their lives as artists and young parents in Milwaukee and Johannesburg exploring moments of fun, awkwardness and good humor. However, the rich range of techniques and visual allusions layered over the works also references an entire history of contemporary art and print making, ranging from Hokusai to Velazquez.”

see the original article