implicit art

Made Real: Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildall
Furtherfield Gallery (formerly HTTP)
Unit A2, Arena Design Centre
71 Ashfield Rd, London N4 1NY
Friday 27 May – Saturday 25 June 2011
Private View: Thursday 26 May 2011, 6.30-9pm

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. Read more…

Strange Vegetation
Milwaukee

Strange Vegetation: Yevgeniya Kaganovich in
collaboration with Nathaniel Stern
Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum
2220 North Terrace Avenue
Milwaukee, WI 53202
8 June – 25 July 2011
Opening Reception: Wednesday 8 June 2011, 5:30-8:30pm

Strange Vegetation grows an ecological system out of the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum’s unique decor. It germinates and mutates the wallpaper’s images into a mesh of living things: physically interconnected and identical plant-like forms projecting, like bulbous roots, from the floor. Over a dozen of these latex volumes slowly breathe in and out, an inflation and deflation cycle that gradually distorts each form. The installation and its surroundings transform the site from museal space to biological habitat, producing a fantastical organism of an imagined future. Strange Vegetation suggests that all built environments are (a) vibrant matter with the capacity for their own movement, change and agency over time. Read more…

Lens: fractions of contemporary photography and video in South Africa
Stellenbosch

Stellenbosch University Art Museum
Ryneveldstraat 52 Ryneveld Street
Stellenbosch, South Africa
11 May to 23 July 2011

Lens: fractions of contemporary photography and video in South Africa combines a collection of old and new work produced by South African artists who performatively use the lens in their practice. It includes several collaborations from Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger’s Distill Life series, and pieces by Bridget Baker, Dineo Bopape, Husain and Hasan Essop, Jo Ractliffe, Kathryn Smith, Pieter Hugo, Stephen Hobbs, Steven Cohen, Zanele Muholi and many others.

Generating the Impossible
Montreal

Finally, my family (Nicole Ridgway and Sidonie Ridgway Stern) and I are also participating in the SenseLab’s residency / conference / performance / exhibition, Generating the Impossible, in Montreal this July. The event, subtitled “A Potlatch For Research-Creation,” will be held in a forest outside of Montreal from 3-7 July 2011 and in the city itself from 8-10 July 2011. Erin Manning, Brian Massumi and all of the event’s participants are working together to re-conceptualize and collaboratively produce a new form of Sentimental Construction as part of the program.
*****

Hope to see some of you around the globe!