Current Tendencies II: Artists from Milwaukee
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

10 Milwaukee artists at the Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University
13th and Clybourn, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
August 24 – December 31, 2011
Opening reception, August 31, 6PM

Concert at Church of the Gesu with John Weissrock, September 14, 6PM
Panel Discussion with Meuninck-Ganger, Stern and others, October 6, 6PM
Lecture by Reginald Baylor and Mark Brautigam, November 9, 6PM

Current Tendencies II features 10 Milwaukee artists working in a variety of media, including photography, painting, drawing, printmaking, video and sculpture.  The exhibition presents many never-before-seen works, commissioned specifically for the Haggerty Museum.  Each artist was paired with a Marquette professor who wrote a reflection of the artist’s work based on the professor’s area of expertise, creating dialogue between artist and scholar and connecting philosophy, theology, political science, communications, etc., to the works in the exhibition.

The exhibition premieres 13 Views of a Journey (6 x 8 feet, see above detail), a new Distill Life installation by Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Nathaniel Stern. Here the artists mount large-scale and translucent prints to plexiglass and rear project video through them, creating “moving images on paper.” The 13 animated vignettes are played in random order behind fibrous and inky paper, making a dynamic and room-sized book art project. Says Philosophy Professor Melissa Shew, “This work is not about the artists, past and present; it is not about correctness in terms of history or technique; it is not about influence and deference…. this work concerns what is possible through collaboration, through layering and uncovering, film and print.”

Jessica and Nathaniel will also be part of a panel discussion at the museum on October 6 at 6 PM, with Will Pergl, Dr. Melissa Shew and Dr. Bonnie Brennen. Other artists featured in Current Tendencies II include Reginald Baylor, Mark Brautigam, Julian Correa, Lisa Hecht, Sharon Kerry-Harlan, Luc Leplae, Will Pergl, and Jordan Waraksa. Catalogs are available at the museum, or as a PDF download.

New Forms Festival: Public Domain
Vancouver, Canada

Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildall, among others
Waldorf Hotel, Vancouver
1489 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC V5L 1S4, Canada
September 9-11, 2011

New Forms Festival 2011 delves into the theme of “Public Domain”, focusing on concepts of copyright art, public interactivity, media façades and relationships between public and private spaces. Utilizing the entire hotel premises, the festival will act as a creative hub, a laboratory for exploration and discovery. Throughout the festival, performances, video projects, workshops and installations will take place in the hotel rooms, various bars, spaces, hallways, outer walls and the back parking lot, including artists such as Antoine Schmitt, Negativland, Patrick Cruz, ARO, Lief Hall and Hart Snider.

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. Their Wikipedia Art hotel room for the New Forms Festival plays with the kinds of parodoxical publicity needed to begin and sustain a Wikipedia page, and charts the inception, birth, life, death and resurrection of their work. It questions the authoritative role of Wikipedia, and reveals its fallibility whilst debating the control of, access to, and creation of, knowledge.

Transcode
Pretoria, South Africa

UNISA Gallery
University of South Africa
Kgorong Building, Ground floor
Preller & Ridge Street
Muckleneuk Ridge, Pretoria
September 7 – 30, 2011
Opening reception: September 7

Transcode: Dialogues Around Intermedia Practice, curated by Gwen Miller at the new UNISA (University of South Africa) Gallery, explores the space between digital and traditional work for contemporary, South African artist-researchers. It premieres new work by many artists, including Lawrence Lemaoana, Celia de Villiers, Frikkie Eksteen, Marcus Neustetter, Carolyn Parton, Churchill Madikida, Colleen Alborough, Minette Vári and Fabian Wargau, among others.

Nathaniel Stern’s new piece, static, is an enclosed installation of six looped films, where each is edited down through “thresholding” the audio: any time the volume goes above a set and very low amplitude, that section is completely removed, and the film jump cuts to the next (nearly) silent sequence. These are in a tight corridor with three body-sized and wall-to-wall projections on either side, spatially putting viewers “in quotes” as they inadvertently cast shadows into the stories around them. High-volume loudspeakers accompany each projection, creating a hum out of the minor background noise left behind in all six Best Picture-winning films: Apocalypse Now, Casablanca, Silence of the Lambs, On The Waterfront, The Godfather II and Midnight Cowboy. What we see or experience is reliant not only on the work’s rich-but-noiseless stasis and over-determined visual action, but also our familiarity with each film or filmic genre. The clips’ varied lengths, styles and narratives, all seen together, accent our collective, social relationships to archetypal stories and characters at large.

Also on exhibition is Stern’s well known interactive piece, stuttering, and several works from his Compressionism and Distill Life series (the latter with collaborator Jessica Meuninck-Ganger).

Out of the Suitcase
Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger are also part of Out of the Suitcase: Works by Recent Recipients of the Mary L. Nohl Suitcase Awards, with their collaborative and solo print work. The exhibition is curated by Mark Lawson and Bruce Knackert in the Frederick Layton Gallery at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, on view now through October 8, and with an opening reception Thursday, September 8, at 6PM.

Other participating artists include: Nicole Brown, Matt Cipov, Michael Davidson, Chris Davis Benavides, Santiago Cucullu, Nicholas Grider, Karen Gunderman, Nicolas Lampert, Angela Laughingheart, Faythe Levine, Shana McCaw and Brent Budsberg, Kimberly Miller, Will Pergl, John Ruebartsch, Val Schleicher, Sonja Thomsen, Christopher Willey and James Zwadlo.

Jessica Meuninck-Ganger
Position / Opposition (detail)  2011 Artist book installation: drypoint, letterpress, etching & aquatint,
lithography and drawing on Thai mulberry paper & muslin  2,3m high X 1,2m X 10m (open)

Jessica Meuninck-Ganger
Position / Opposition
2 – 23 July 2011
Opening Saturday 2 July at 14:00

Opening address by Max Yela
(Head, Special Collections, UWM Libraries; Adjunct Associate Lecturer, UWM Department of Art & Information;
Adjunct Instructor, UWM School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA)

Preview by appointment
Exhibition catalogue available (on-line version via www.galleryaop.com)

Walkabout
Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Max Yela will conduct a public walkabout before the opening, at 11:00 on Saturday 2 June. All welcome!

Artist-printmakers
A special walkabout/information session will be held on Sunday 3 July at 14:00 for artist-printmakers

“Position/Opposition is an installation of over one hundred etchings and drawings assembled in a variety of presentation formats, including: a suite of six hanging print assemblages (45 x 66 cm), a large book (1.2 x 2.3 x 6 m – open); and one work from an edition of five artist’s books (maquette versions of the large book). Each work is a compound composition of expressive faces and hands that embody an emotive collaboration between two subjects. All of the prints on paper are participatory in nature and utilize the same subject imagery, but due to the ranging formats and scale, each depicts a unique conversation.” (Jessica  Meuninck-Ganger, 2011)

Jessica Meuninck-Ganger is a ‘context-provider’ (rather than a ‘content-provider’, in the words of British artist Peter Dunn) in this installation of prints, folios, and books that combine traditional processes of etching and lithography with new technologies, and incorporate the structural techniques of sculpture and book arts. She says: “I compose autobiographical memoirs that unfold like journal pages made for public view. An enthusiast of fine papers, prints and books a subjects, I am interested in people’s interactions with them as physical forms and conceptual spaces.”

Meuninck-Ganger’s work involves the creative orchestration of collaborative encounters and conversations well beyond the institution of the gallery. Her artist’s books are catalysts or surprisingly powerful transformations in the consciousness of their ‘readers’. The conversations they generate become an integral part of the work itself, which is collaboratively achieved.

Short biography
Jessica Meuninck-Ganger’s prints, artist’s books and large-scale mixed media works have been exhibited in museums and both experimental and commercial galleries regionally – near her home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin – nationally in the US and internationally. Her works on paper and her artist’s books are included in several private and public collections, including the Weisman Museum of Art and the Target Corporation, and in contemporary publications, such as Richard Noyce’s recent book, ‘Printmaking Beyond the Edge’ (collaboration with Nathaniel Stern). She has received residencies and fellowships all over the world, and has instructed printmaking courses and workshops throughout various states in America. Jessica received her MFA in Studio Arts from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2004 and is currently Head of Printmaking at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA.

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!

karaoke deathmatch 100

Since 1996, Michael Sarff and Tim Whidden have partnered as MTAA, incorporating participatory performances, group installations, aesthetic decision by popular vote and creative collaborations into their worked.

This talk includes a participatory art work!

More info: http://mteww.com/
Sponsored by Peck School of the Arts
Contact: Michael Passmore, passmom@uwm.edu, 414-229-6052

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.

No 1: The Choreographed Accident

from Digital Arts Remote Lectures
….

I’m very excited to announce our very first Remote Lecture for 2010 by Marcelino Stuhmer based at the University of Wisconsin in Milwakee .

The Choreographed Accident: How painting survived the accident.

In this Remote Lecture Marcelino Struhmer will be speaking his expanded painting practice in three recent works.

“The metaphoric crossing between perception and hallucination occurs by means of the paraphernalia of painting, which is also that of recollection and re-cognition, as the recovery, to the senses, of what seemed to be forever beyond experience.” Paul de Man

“Mise-en-abyme”, a term coined by Andre Gide, which refers to the artistic trope of limitless reflection is akin to the physical experience of the carnival’s Mirror Maze. In my current extended painting practice, I wish the viewer to “enter into the work” and find themselves occupying a different parallel space, narrative, and time.  The spatial/architectural constructions in three recent installation projects deconstruct the cinema house into 1) a panoramic painting rotunda, 2) a funhouse mirror maze, and 3) a miniature architectural model of an apartment building in Warsaw.

In the broadest sense, the crisis of representation as seen in the history of painting provides me with a dynamic conceptual meeting point between material, process, and language. My recent installation work reconstructs or invents narratives of distant geographic, and temporal moments, allowing a collision of virtual ‘present-moments’ in an installation space designed specifically to stage these orchestrated time-collisions. I am currently working on a series of paintings, collages, and architectural models, which explores an intersection of image, film, painting, screen, and the history of theater design.

The Remote Lecture Series is a series of once a month lectures by people in different places across the world who are “beamed in” live (via the internet) to speak to a Johannesburg audience. We use available video conferencing technologies like Skype and iChat for the live lecture.  The point of these lectures is to inspire and uplift the discourses around art, new media and technology. We also stream the sessions live from Johannesburg.

Thursday 12th August 2010   -   South African Time 19:00 – Digital Arts Seminar Room, Digital Arts Convent Building. See here for directions – opposite the Wits School of Arts.  Also see calendar page…

Please note – GMT 17:00 for streaming.

Marcelino Stuhmer earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2000. He has done residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, was a guest artist at Cittadellarte-Pistoletto Foundation in Biella, Italy, and was awarded a residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam where he received a two-year research fellowship.

His most recent installation project, The Choreographed Accident: Objects, Images and Artifacts from the Pawel Avorsky Museum, Warsaw which debuted at Jeune Creation 2009 in Paris, is now showing at the Wisconsin Triennial 2010, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Madison, Wisconsin, USA. This conceptual film project tells the story of a British spy during the Cold War who smuggled illegal Jazz records into Poland.

Apart from numerous exhibitions in Europe and North America, Stuhmer has won a number of grants and prizes, including Best International Artist at the Arte Laguna 2009 International Art Prize Exhibition at the Venice Arsenalle in Venice, Italy, a Graduate Committee Research Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, the First Place Royal Prize for Painting in The Netherlands, a Mondrian International Publication and Exhibition Grant, a Community Artist Assistance Program Grant from Chicago, and a Joan Mitchell award in conjunction with an artist residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Painting and Drawing area of the Department of Visual Art at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

For more information please contact me directly on tegan (dot) bristow (at) wits (dot) ac (dot) za or 011 717 4604

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!

“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

*

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

Artists Now!
Department of Visual Art
Guest Lecture Series

Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 7:00pm
Arts Center Lecture Hall (ACL 120) on the UWM campus
2400 E. Kenwood Blvd.
Free and Open to the Public

In this talk Lieberman will present his interactive works and collaborations, focusing on the artistic process as research.  He will show works such as Manual Input Sessions, in which an old school overhead projector is transformed into a magical audio visual performance device, and Lights On, a performance of sound and light commissioned for the 2009 opening of the new Ars Electronica center in Linz.  He will also talk about openFrameworks, a C++ toolkit for creative coding which is being used by developers worldwide to make compelling interactive installations and performances.

Zach Lieberman flier

“… The work is funny, pretty and accessible, but it’s also complicated, surprising, exceedingly well crafted and rewards a long-term relationship. That’s your cue to rush out and buy a piece, take it home and plug it in.”

“I’d better take a stab at describing the pieces in the gallery, although it would be easier all round if you checked out the video of the work on www.mg.co.za/stern. Basically, it’s a new-media mash-up. Paraphrasing the artists’ own description: they mount translucent prints and drawings on top of video screens, creating moving pictures on paper.”

“That doesn’t do justice to, for example, the mesmerising, joyful experience of watching insubstantial sharks endlessly circling The Gallerist. He’s depicted kneeling on some driftwood in the middle of the ocean while sketchy vultures hover ominously. And there’s a perfect beauty to The Great Oak, the central image of which is a drawing of a sturdy tree, already complicated by the digital echo of itself, counterpointed by ghostly figures leaping at its base.”

…

“So when you wander around the show at the misnamed Art on Paper, or if you’re lucky enough to have one of these works on your wall, you can choose. Do you just want to enjoy the playful nature of a piece such as Twin City — whoah! Here comes the flying cow again! — or do you want to meditate on the nature of the loop, which ‘without origin or telos … interweaves the work’s time with the spectator’s as rhythm rather than succession’?”

“I know, you’re a 21st-century art lover, so you want it all — profundity and plasticity, facile conversation piece and deep worth. Greedy. But with this work, you can have it all and, in true hypertextual style, leap from moment to moment, constantly recreating desire and satisfaction, in much the same way as the looped video constantly re-enacts the pleasure of watching.”

Read the entire article.

Kinnickinnic, 2009, lithograph + LCD with video, 255 x 355 x 50mm

GALLERY AOP (Art on Paper) presents

Passing Between
A collaboration incorporating traditional printmaking and contemporary digital, video and networked art
by Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger

30 January – 27 February 2010
Opening Saturday 30 January from 12:00 to 16:00
Opening address by Prof. Christo Doherty, Wits Digital Arts, at 12:30
The artists will be in attendance at the opening

Walkabout on Saturday 6 February at 12:00
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue and DVD

Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger approach both old and new media as form. They 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. 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 work with subject matter ranging from historical portraiture to current events, from artificial landscapes to socially awkward moments.

Jessica Meuninck-Ganger is a Milwaukee-based artist. Her prints, artist’s books and large-scale mixed media works have been exhibited in the USA and in the rest of the world. She received her MFA in Studio Arts from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2004 and is currently Head of Printmaking at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA.

Nathaniel Stern is an installation and video artist, net.artist, printmaker and writer. He has had solo exhibitions at various museums, academic institutions, and commercial and experimental galleries worldwide. He obtained his PhD in Art & Technology from Trinity College, Dublin in 2009 and is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Art, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA.

Jessica and Nathaniel met at their first University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee Visual Art Faculty Meeting in August 2008, became fast friends, and decided to begin collaborating whilst on a trip to the Milwaukee Zoo with their kids a few months later.

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