Nathaniel Stern's Giverny of the Midwest

South Africa Mon 25-07-2011

Nathaniel Stern's Giverny of the Midwest
Press Release

Nathaniel Stern becomes the veritable proprietor of Giverny in his third show at GALLERY AOP, referencing Claude Monet’s famous house and garden in France, as well as one of the famous Impressionist’s best known works, Water Lilies (1914 – 1926) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Giverny of the Midwest (detail) | Nathaniel Stern | 2 m X 12 m | 2011 | Archival Digital Print Edition 3

Giverny of the Midwest is a panoramic installation of nearly 100 prints in Stern’s ongoing series of performative prints. In order to perform these prints, Stern straps a desktop scanner, laptop and custom-made battery pack to his body, and performs images into existence.

He might scan in straight, long lines across tables, tie the scanner around his 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 the artist’s body, technology and the landscape is transformed into beautiful and quirky renderings, which are then produced as archival art objects.

Nathaniel Stern scanning Lilies

Giverny of the Midwest is typical of the Stern’s art practice in this regard. He renders water, lilies, leaves and other organic forms into lush and rippling images. The source materials were scanned during a week-long camping trip next to a lily pond in South Bend, Indiana, and edited together over the course of nearly two years.

Giverny of the Midwest detail

The piece explicitly cites Claude Monet’s large-scale painting and installation, Water Lilies at MoMA. It is similarly an immersive triptych of over 250 square feet (totalling 2 x 12 metres), and follows the patterns of light and colour in Monet’s panorama.

The three panels comprising Giverny of the Midwest are then broken down into differently-sized and –shaped prints on watercolour paper, each evenly spaced apart. It forms a veritable bricolage of shape, colour and texture: the formalist language of modernism turned on its head.

Giverny of the Midwest (Middle Panel)

The tensions between flow and geometry, life and modularity, place it in further dialogue with other trajectories of post-modern and contemporary art, and simultaneously activate the possibilities of working across digital and traditional forms. Stern is the ultimate bricoleur in this regard: a post-modern ‘builder’ with access to many tools and new languages to address visual problems in an innovative way.

As part of the exhibition, Stern has produced an artist’s book, In the fold, as well as eight individual prints, The Giverny Series, (edition of 10 each), both produced using imagery from the aforementioned “art camping trip” in South Bend, Indiana.

Giverny of the Midwest detail

Nathaniel Stern is an experimental installation and video artist, net artist, printmaker and writer. He has held solo exhibitions at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johnson Museum of Art, Museum of Wisconsin Art, University of the Witwatersrand, and several commercial and experimental galleries worldwide, most recently, in London, and in New Zealand and Canada in the very near future.

Giverny of the Midwest detail

International showings include the Venice Biennale, Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art, South African National Gallery, Kunsthalle Exnergasse, International Print Center New York, Milwaukee Art Museum, Transmediale, and the Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Hungary. Recent features of Nathaniel’s work can be seen in the Leonardo Journal of Art, Science and Technology, NY Arts, and Art South Africa magazines, Rhizome.org, PBS.org, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, UK and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Nathaniel Stern

Giverny of the Midwest

30 July – 13 August 2011
Opening Saturday July 30 at 14:00
Opening address by Jeremy Wafer
(Associate Professor of Fine Art, Wits School of Fine Art)

Artist walkabout on Thursday 4 August at 18:00

Additional artist’s talks: 4 August at 12:30 at the Digital Convent, Wits and on 5 August at 09:00 at UNISA (Sunnyside Campus)

GALLERY AOP (Art on Paper)
44 Stanley Avenue Braamfontein Werf (Milpark) Johannesburg
+27 11 726 2234
info@galleryaop.com
www.galleryaop.com

Posted By: Diana Achieng

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