Exhibition Catalog

Title: Replacing Home
Writer and curator: Jennifer Johung
Publisher: JAUS Gallery and University of Minnesota Press
Date of Publication: 2012
Design: Joe Grennier
Language: English
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Available from the JAUS Gallery, Los Angeles

Since the very first images were made by dipping hands in natural pigment and pressing them on cave walls in Lacaux and Altamira, artists have been getting their hands dirty to make their mark. These simple images have to be some of the most economical, powerful and evocative symbols known to us. I believe it helpful to revisit visual images of this nature, to regain perspective and seek solace in them.
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Just as language cannot be defined as alphabets, words or syntax, printmaking cannot be defined as a series of technical processes. It is defined by its function, its philosophical approach and the ideas and images it generates. Print may stake claim to creative territory that goes beyond any map; the meaning of the images produced by print media are the expanded terrain, the mediate milieu of the dialogue, the larger picture.
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Nathaniel Stern is a prolific experimental video installation and time-based artist and write who harnesses printmaking to extend his repertoire:
“I combine new and traditional media to create unfamiliar experiences of that which we encounter every day. My art attempts to intercept taken for granted categories such as ‘body,’ ‘language,’ ‘vision,’ ’space’ or ‘power.’ It works to refigure fixed subject / object hierarchies as unexpected and dynamic engagements…
Through performance, provocation and play, my work seeks to infold our unfolding relationships with the world, and with one another. I invite viewers to explore, to embody, and to re-imagine.”

Compressionism is a digital performance and analog archive started in 1996 [sic] where 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 of his relationship to the landscape is transformed into beautiful and quirky renderings, which are re-stretched and coloured on his laptop, then produced as archival art objects using photographic or inkjet processes. He also often takes details from these images and reinterprets them as traditional prints: lithographs, etchings, engravings and woodcuts.

Michael Smith comments that “Stern’s entire process expands to encompass fairly traditional printmaking techniques, and a great tension is established by this…. The results are compelling, an amalgamation of visual languages from two very different ends of Western Art history…one that accrues a salacious, lo-fi quality that adds another dimension to Stern’s repertoire”. It is interesting to note that these works are not only painterly but undoubtedly printerly in their aesthetic; in addition the notion of compression and pressure that is so vital to printmaking is central.

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What happens to artists who are singled out, identified as exceptional or promising in a very public way?

In a practical sense it may mean added pressure and more deadlines, but, ironically, high-profile affirmations of artistic instinct can inspire some to question their art making practices more than ever. They are effectively given license to risk and recalibrate.

Such has been the case with many of the artists included in three exceptional surveys of regional, contemporary art, the “Current Tendencies II” exhibit at the Haggerty Museum of Art, the “Mary L. Nohl Fellowship Exhibition” at Inova and the “Dressing the Monument” show at the Lynden Sculpture Garden.

In many cases, I found the work of artists I thought I knew to be unfamiliar, and I discovered artists I didn’t yet know. It was, in short, a revelation.

The openings for these shows were among the more electric art events I’ve attended in recent years, jammed with people puzzling over, experiencing and talking about art. It speaks well of the quality of work being made here.

For this reason, this trio of shows, which have nothing to do with each other, incidentally, are my top recommendations for this Gallery Night & Day, the citywide art crawl that takes place Friday evening and Saturday.

It was fascinating to see what artist Reginald Baylor did when he ran out of time to create paintings – which can take several months – for the show at the Haggerty, 530 N. 13th St. The complex ideas that connect his iconography, ideas that are usually locked in his mind and rarely implicit in his work, spilled out in some works. He also continued to mine his mainstay imagery in entirely new materials, creating animation and quilts.

We have seen the collaborative works of Nathaniel Stern and Jessica Meuninck-Ganger before, but not quite on this scale and ambition, at least locally. The artists mount prints and drawings onto video screens, creating moving images on paper and a dialogue between old and new art forms. The juxtapositions of imagery and methodology, between the recognizable and the less known – all of it moving in real time – creates a fascinating, textured in between space.

“You step back,” wrote Melissa Shew, a visiting professor of philosophy at Marquette, who wrote about the installation for the exhibition catalogue. “You consider the whole once again, and you view the journey. You understand that this installation speaks to the multilayered, prismatically dimensioned interplay between space and time.”

“Current Tendencies” also marks Mark Brautigam’s debut into the contemporary art scene here. His first major project is a knowing and meditative photographic portrait of our state. From a desolate street in Superior to a 90-year-old woman raking in Hurley, Brautigam explores the quiet dignity of seemingly unremarkable people and places.

Other artists included in the Haggerty show are Julian Correa, Lisa Hecht, Sharon Kerry-Harlan, Luc Leplae, Will Pergl and Jordan Waraksa.

Over at Inova, 2155 N. Prospect Ave., at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the winners of the 2010 Mary L. Nohl Fellowships have work on view.

The Mary L. Nohl Fellowship exhibition is the culmination of the fellowship year, the most prestigious prize for individual artists locally. In this the eighth such round we find artist Paul Druecke, who left Milwaukee and returned, continues to make a significant contribution here. There is a wonderful, conceptual through line in Druecke’s work. More than a decade ago he bestowed the status of “park” on forlorn and leftover patches of urban landscape with art happenings; today he explores the language of historical markers, those seemingly unassailable landmarks that tell it like it is.

Waldek Dynerman has been breaking apart and fusing together old things, from dolls’ heads to mechanical objects, for his assemblages for some time. But his work takes on a new life in the immersive, theatrical installation he created for the Nohl show. At a time when the not-so-distant past feels farther away than it used to, Dynerman taps into the sheer otherly nature of bygone days in an expressive and exacting fashion.

Ashley Morgan’s work is as subtle and sophisticated as I’ve ever seen it in the Nohl installation. Though her work consistently explores love and loss through the processes of collection, repetition and decay, her artworks also stand beautifully alone.

We are drawn into the Inova gallery by a kind of temporary stained glass that Morgan has created with a thin – and ephemeral – layer of honey. On a handrail, she has carved a pattern of Xs and Os that could so easily be dismissed as non-art, just part of the room, just pattern. In perhaps the most formally eloquent piece in the show, she collected eyelashes in tiny vials of rainwater, placing them in a case above water, which catches their reflection. Nearby, a dish hangs on a wall where visitors are invited to leave eyelashes, or wishes, for the artist who is painstakingly hoarding her own.

Other artists included in the Nohl exhibit at Inova are Brent Coughenour, Sarah Buccheri, Neil Gravander and Chris James Thompson.

Over at the Lynden Sculpture Garden, 2145 W. Brown Deer Rd., River Hills, “Dressing the Monument” serves as the culmination of a series of exhibitions in which artists responded to the permanent collection, a series that marked Lynden’s new place in the art community.

This final exhibition features temporary sculpture by an exceptional array of artists from the Midwest, and a few from New York and Switzerland, too. Some of the artists include Nicholas Frank, Michelle Grabner, Lucas Knipscher, Tobias Madison, John Miller, David Robbins, Hannah Weinberger, Anicka Yi and Matt Sheridan Smith.

Lyndenis not open on Gallery Night, but is open Saturday during Gallery Day.

All three of these shows are well outside the epicenter of Gallery Night & Day, the Third Ward, but each will rival any art-seeing experience in town. With that said, let me quickly offer a few more recommendations.

“Generation Next” opens Friday at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, 273 East Erie St., and is billed as a collection of artists “whose talents identify them as the next generation to make a significant contribution to the cultural life of the region.” The show includes Minneapolis artist Evan Baden, Milwaukee artist Sarah Gail Luther and Madison artists Sofia Arnold, Emily Belknap and Melissa Cooke.

Former Milwaukeean and now Brooklyn-based artist Jason Rohlf returns home for a solo show of his abstract paintings at the Tory Folliard Gallery, 233 N. Milwaukee St. When I visited Rohlf’s studio last fall, venturing up to his roof and seeing the layers of architecture and sounds in his neighborhood, the densely textured surfaces of his work began to make more sense.

His rhythmic and geometric works are exercises in what to treasure and what to let go, and how to make all of these things part of a whole.

Finally, I’d be remiss if – since we’re looking at contemporary art this time around – I didn’t mention the first survey of works by Taryn Simon on view in the contemporary galleries at the Milwaukee Art Museum, 700 N. Art Museum Dr. Not for the faint hearted and appealing to both our prurient and noble sides, it exposes unseen aspects of the American landscape.

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Current Tendencies II: Artists from Milwaukee, newly opened at the Haggerty Museum of Art, is a curated potluck of work by ten Milwaukee-based artists. The pieces on view trend toward large-scale, expansive installations, with some quirky humor and pleasant surprises.

Jordan Waraksa “Untitled.” Zebrawood, walnut, steel. Courtesy of the artist.
Like many Haggerty exhibitions, the art starts happening as soon as you enter the door. Julian Correa has charge of the opening salvo with Contents Under Pressure, a combination of a sculptural (and rather carnival-esque) representation of an exploding spray paint can and panel paintings hung high upon the walls. There are lot of objects competing for attention, but some of the most gripping moments are in the grisaille background, with figures and images that are anything but wallflowers.

Two particularly strong installations bookend the exhibition, beginning with artist and musician Jordan Waraksa’s sparse but satisfyingly rich combination of sound and sculpture. Elegant conical zebrawood forms sit in twisted balance as music, combining strains of classical and folk-tinged songs, emanates from within. The visuals are arresting enough, the but music firmly roots the visitor to the space. This little gallery may be a favorite place to pause on repeated stops this autumn season.

Jessica Meunick-Ganger and Nathaniel Stern. “13 Views of a Journey” Courtesy of the artists.
Another of the smaller gallery spaces that stands out is the technologically savvy work of Jessica Meuninck-Ganger and Nathaniel Stern. 13 Views of a Journey is more than a digital collage, more than moving images. Combining references of the contemporary world and historical works by artists such as Eadweard Muybridge and Utagawa Hiroshige, the piece sends the viewer on a journey, moving forward yet back in time.

Tactile sensibilities are played up in the fabric work of Sharon Kerry-Harlan, as textures and words circle around explorations of the the human face. Lisa Hecht brings together eye-dazzling patterned wallpaper and obliquely probing questions, while Mark Brautigam’s photographs seem straightforward until you start getting into the details. Humor and puzzles are to be found in works by Will Pergl, Reginald Baylor, and the charming, hilarious, and poignant drawings of Luc Leplae.

So what are the “Current Tendencies,” so to speak? They range freely over a wide range of disciplines and mediums. But generally, there is a sense of looking outward, to social commentary and response, telling a story or sending a message. This reflects a momentary cross section of Milwaukee’s creative energy, but this exhibition creates a unique touchstone as time, as well as art, marches on.

Read all of “Current Tendencies II: Artists from Milwaukee” at the Haggerty in context

*With wild installation rooms and outdoor light-painting, the interdisciplinary, border-bashing festival takes over the Waldorf*

It’s hard to stay on the cutting edge for more than an instant. In the fast-paced world of media art, ideas come and go literally at the speed of light; yesterday’s conceptual breakthrough is all too often today’s TV commercial. Yet for the past decade, Vancouver’s New Forms Festival has stayed at the forefront of all things interdisciplinary, reliably tapping into an international network of borderless creativity.

“This year, though,” says director and curator Malcolm Levy, “something really interesting has happened.”

Indeed it has. A multimedia festival that was once amorphous, although innovative, has found renewed focus—and an event that formerly relied on various low-rent venues around town has found a new home in an old hotel. This year, New Forms takes place in what’s rapidly becoming an East Van icon, the recently renovated and artist-friendly Waldorf. With everything in one place—artists’ accommodation upstairs, fine Lebanese dining downstairs, three live-music venues, and a bar for socializing—a certain synergy is starting to build.

“What we have is a location where we can have complete control of the venue,” says Levy, on the line from the New Forms office. “The hotel rooms, the music rooms, and the whole outside façade of the building are all being used as part of the festival. So, basically, the goal this year is to make the space itself almost an installation during the weekend.”

For an event that lasts only three days, New Forms has assembled a head-spinning array of audience options—everything from wildly danceable electronic pop to serious discussions about copyright law. With its emphasis on an immersive mix of sight and sound, the event should offer what the poet Arthur Rimbaud once termed “the rational derangement of the senses”: an easily accessible route out of ordinary reality. With multisensory delights that include nighttime light-painting on the Waldorf’s west wall, it also has clear and intentional echoes of ’60s-style happenings. Sometimes new forms are just old ones waiting to be rediscovered.

“There are definitely influences from the ’60s, and from other things like the Fluxus movement, within New Forms,” says Levy. “It’s temporal in nature. You know, it’s happening within the space over the weekend; it’s about coming and being part of that and involving yourself within it. It’s not necessarily a sensory overload, but there’s definitely a chance to take in a lot at one time.”

Levy is especially excited about how festival artists will get to change several Waldorf locations into intimate galleries for the presentation and dissemination of media art.

“There are, I think, a total of 18 rooms at the Waldorf,” he says. “Eight of them have never been renovated, and those are all being used for installations. And then we have artists staying in the other rooms.…That definitely changes the dynamic in a very positive way. It becomes like one big family, in a sense.”

Given that one of the major themes of this year’s festival is the control of information, it’s appropriate that the artists will be able to take part in informal exchanges of ideas—at breakfast, say, or over a late-night drink. And in the more structured environment of the installation rooms, they will also play with notions of who controls what we see and hear.

“One of the pieces I think is going to be fun to see is the Wikipedia Art room, and that’s being done by Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern,” Levy notes. “What they’re going to be doing is creating a Wikipedia hotel room; the entire room will be set up with décor based around the concept of Wikipedia art.”

Kildall and Stern have already sparked controversy: intended to flag the ways in which content is controlled on Wikipedia, their original Wiki page was deleted by the popular information site’s administrators within 15 hours of its installation. Later on, Wikipedia Art’s appearance at the 2009 Venice Biennale was shut down by Italian police, apparently due to concerns over copyright violations, in an echo of the legal landslide California-based sound collagists and copyright activists Negativland provoked with their 1991 release of a sample-laden swipe at U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”. Negativland founder Mark Hoskins will be contributing to New Forms’ more formal aspect, a conference on copyright issues called Art, Revolution and Ownership, and Wikipedia Art’s presence should also help kick-start the debate.

Organized in conjunction with the Artists’ Legal Outreach nonprofit, the symposium opens at SFU Woodward’s today (September 8), before moving to the Waldorf. It came out of Artists’ Legal Outreach lawyer Martha Rans’s concern that the creative sector was not adequately represented in Ottawa during the federal government’s recent overhaul of Canada’s copyright laws.

“I did my spiel and I sat there for two hours listening to however many speakers say what they had to say to the minister—and I thought what we really ought to be doing is talking to each other,” Rans explains in a separate telephone interview. “What the whole copyright issue often devolves into is industry versus user, and many artists have said to me, ‘What does that have to do with me? Neither argument resonates with me at all.’ And one thing that I do know is that in order to get artists to come and talk about these issues, you kind of have to make it about them. Hence the idea of an art exhibition.…I thought this would be a rather surreptitious way of teaching [artists] this stuff by getting them to talk about their work.”

Levy agrees. “You have this interesting two-fold dialectic happening,” he explains. “On one hand, you have people fighting for the opening of all content, this really strong push towards opening up the airwaves, so to speak. And then, on the other hand, you have the very important need for artists to be paid for their work, especially in a time when downloading and access to information is so ubiquitous.

“I don’t know if there is a resolution to that,” he adds, “but I think it’s a good discussion to be having.”

And if things get too heated? Well, there’s always the Tiki Bar.

The New Forms Festival takes place at the Waldorf Hotel from Friday to Sunday (September 9 to 11).

Impressionism has become so unsexy in the last couple of decades. Well, in art circles, that is. Mostly it’s because this once avant-garde French movement has been embraced with such gusto by the masses. For this reason many overseas public galleries wishing to up the foot traffic in their institutions and assert their relevance to society stage themed shows from this period, or exhibitions by artists connected to it.

The frequency of these impressionism blockbusters has rendered the art from that movement blasé. So it is surprising to find a multi-media artist who embraces what is termed “contemporary practice” to be so captured by the art of Claude Monet and in particular his artwork Water Lilies (1914-1926). As the title suggests they are paintings of the most banal of still life subject matter: tranquil ponds dotted with lilies Monet spied in his garden in Giverny, France.

For Nathanial Stern the radicalism of the impressionist vocabulary hasn’t quite worn off. He returns to it anew with an eye for reinventing it for the digitised era. Like many viewers who have stood in front of Monet’s large scale paintings in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Stern was seduced by the romantic, hazy lens through which Monet depicted this bucolic scene. In his version of Monet’s Water Lilies he has retained the large scale in his triptych Giverny of the Midwest – the pond he studied was in Indiana. Stern was aware scale played an important role in creating an immersive experience for viewers. He deconstructs and then reconstructs Monet’s approach, but this activity is not in service of demystifying, or satirising it, but re-enacting a moment in art history using digital media.

“Immersion” and “deconstruction” inform this body of work and Stern’s mode of documenting reality, which involves an HP scanner harnessed around his neck as he wades through the pond. Put plainly, he scans his subject matter. Because he does not remain static while doing this he generates images that appear life-like, but distorted. Not too unlike the kind of distortion reality undergoes under Monet’s heightened gaze, which amplifies the physical and sensual properties of his interest.

Just as Monet realised a purely figurative rendering of organic life doesn’t quite relay the physical experience or weight of reality, so does Stern recognise a straight life-like scan won’t do so either. Stern’s proximity to his subject matter facilitates a level of abstraction before he has even begun his process of “decompression”, which involves undoing the compression of the image. He is so close to his subject matter he doesn’t necessarily observe it, but is immersed in it. Because of this the view is distorted. It is a bit like putting the lens of a camera right up against that which is to be photographed.

Physical distance is a prerequisite for representation. Stern’s approach challenges this idea for not only is he immersed in his subject matter, but ironically he equips himself with a gadget that has no view-finder so he is unable to see the images he is capturing. As a result he records while not being trapped by, or implicated in, the act of recording. Thus representation is separated from seeing, it becomes an intuitive act of another kind.

This, of course, is the antithesis of the effect digital mediums have had on a society which has become more consumed with the act of documenting life that reality is viewed through a lens. In this way Stern succeeds in achieving what Monet never could: he is able to exist in a moment without the burden of reconstructing it. For this reason he is a participant rather than a detached observer. Stern is able to produce images that relay so much detail, like a insect caught in a petal or the veins of a leaf. These details might have evaded his detection despite his proximity and immersion. This suggests he was unable to fully appreciate the scene in its totality. In this way the full weight of reality is always withheld.

It is only in the processing of his scanned images, in which he stretches them out, that another encounter with his subject matter becomes possible. This encounter is obviously subject to his manipulation; he heightens the colours and decompresses the images to such a point that they are abstracted.

Stern doesn’t present one cohesive view of the pond, but a plethora of cropped details of it. The images are pieced together to form three larger “canvases”. They need to be scrutinised up close, where you can spy traces of the submersion of his physical being in the work – denoted by finger prints.

These works are excessively beautiful and compel immersion. Viewing them is a time-demanding exercise, which defies our usual consumption of imagery. This is exacerbated by the number of small canvases one must view, which appear like pieces of a puzzle even though they do not fit together to create a complete image. These are fragments of reality. Stern suggests a scene cannot be relayed in its entirety, so despite his reverence he challenges Monet’s work. Stern doesn’t order the visual world; he casts his garden pond scene as an indeterminate one that exists beyond the boundaries of any frame.

*Giverny of the Midwest has been on show at the Art on Paper Gallery in Joburg.

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related press: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (October 2011), Third Coast Digest (September 2011), Milwaukee Magazine (August 2011)

Professor Melissa Shew’s catalog text:

What you see: A large installation that weaves together traditional and contemporary artistic techniques. You see etchings, video, dialogue, and artists old and new. You are disoriented - a proper feeling in our contemporary world - and you wonder: How can I really see this work of art? It impresses you immediately with its manifold expression of exuberant fervor for play -lots of play- between art and artist, past and present, what fades away and what holds. And more. You see that the work is in two halves, and from there, four quadrants. The quadrants connect in a book; the book unfolds history; and through it, time passes as the pages turn. A narrative askew, the work unfolds a metanarrative about art, about life: Informed by the past (do you note the beautiful etchings?) and desiring the future (do you see the power and potential of collaborative work here?), we continue to be displaced in the present, which flashes and fades like the dialogue you see - never totalizing, always gesturing beyond this moment. A hint here and there, a signpost for a destination always deferred.

You look closer. You see dead artists and their art, living artists and their art. You note five vignettes that loop quasi- randomly as the artists of this installation travel from time to time to visit those who have shaped their collaborative practices: Utagawa Hiroshige, whose ukiyo-e school woodblock prints and paintings demonstrate the ephemeral beauty of the everyday; Johannes Gutenberg, who changed the world with the printing press; Eadweard Muybridge, a groundbreaking photographer of human and animal movement; Andy Warhol - well, you know him; Nam June Paik, a Korean-born American video artist whose work inspires contemporary artistic media. You see examples of their art - a tribute to the artists, and you see their influence on our artists’ work - again, a tribute. Thirteen vignettes in total - these five, plus eight of the artists’ own collaborative projects.

You are kept at a distance. You step back. You consider the whole once again, and you view the journey. You understand that this installation speaks to the multilayered, prismatically dimensioned interplay between space and time. Your reflections might include the following: The past is irretrievable and the future not-yet; we are thrown into an open space that is not a space, and a time that is not a time. Like so many before us, we may long to return to our origin, or to the origin of all that is. But we know that this nostalgia signifies an impossible longing for home, an uncanny understanding of what never was in the first place - our simple belonging to the world.

Thus, we search. We realize that there is more for us to learn from this work, and we realize our error: We thought we could see it by ourselves, in isolation. You by yourself, and me by myself. Each of us alone. But it was not conceptualized by one artist, but two, and even more than two - its debt to the dead betrays the artists’ sensibilities, and suddenly, too suddenly, the cards are on the table: 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. Not exclusively, at least. Rather, this work concerns what is possible through collaboration, through layering and uncovering, film and print. And so it concerns what’s in-between - the artists and you, the art and me, you and me, ourselves and the world. We might see that what’s possible for us is found “in-between,” and that creativity springs from here and nowhere else. We look closer.

And we are invited in.

- full catalog available from the Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, or as PDF (4mb)

static creates a cacophony of silence, perceptually undulating between rich-but-noiseless stasis and over-determined visual action. What we see or experience is reliant not only on our familiarity with each film or filmic genre, but also on how static’s modular, disjunctured dialogues interact with one another and present themselves in the space. Their varied lengths, styles and narratives, all seen together, turn the work into an interstitial and open-ended montage of fleeting moments made monumental. Taken as a whole, it accents our collective, social relationships to archetypal stories and characters at large.

documentation images (video and more images coming soon)

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static is a generatively created artwork, using custom software developed by electronic engineer Hugh Denman and media artist Nathaniel Stern, specifically for this project. It premiered as part of TRANSCODE: Dialogues Around Intermedia Practice at the University of South Africa in Pretoria, August-September 2011.

Museum Catalog

Title: Current Tendencies II: Artists From Milwaukee
Editor and curator: Lynne Shumow
Essays by: Bonnie Brennen, Roberta Coles, Ryan Hanley, Thomas Jablonsky, Jason Ladd, Richard Lewis, Danielle Nussberger, Melissa Shew and Larry Watson
Publisher: The Haggerty Museum
Date of Publication: 2011
Language: English
Download as PDF (4mb)
Available from the Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee