For the last several years, Nathaniel Stern has been capturing and collecting quiet, slow motion moments in parks and public land around the world with his iPhone, ten of which premiere at Gallery 2622 on October 5th, 2018. Impossibly drawn-out butterflies, insects, and fish, respectively swoop, creep, and crawl; lazy streams, sluggish water drops, and dancing-while-rippling reflections of sun beams – all displayed on wood-framed 14″ LCD screens. They feel anticipatory and curious, sympathetic and strange. And each reminds us that technology and nature are not as far apart as we might think, that the engineered and natural worlds often amplify, infect, inhabit, and even help one another, rather than being at odds.

Of a Slow Nature does not exhibit Stern’s most well-known series, and producing these videos is not central to his practice. Instead, the exhibition asks us to explore Stern’s common themes of bodies, technologies, and the landscape together, with the commercial phones in our pocket, the Best-Buy LCD screens we encounter on a regular basis. The artist wants us to do this every day, all the time, whenever it occurs to us – whether that be because we want to play and think differently with our media devices, or because that cloud or flower are doing something fun and interesting. Listen, feel, think, and act. Resituate, speculate, wonder, and propose.

At stake, whether in our everyday interactions or on a much larger scale, are the (digital) relationships between humans and the natural world on the one hand, between politics and commerce on the other.