Nataša Prosenc Stearns / Caryatids and Medusas
Nataša Prosenc Stearns / Caryatids and Medusas
UGM Studio, Trg Leona Štuklja 2
opening: Friday, 16 June 2017, at 19:00
The exhibition by Nataša Prosenc Stearns is a combination of video projections, prints, and videos on LCD screens. On this occasion, the artist deals with the topic of women in contemporary media. The project is set at the core of the changing consideration and perception of the female body and face. It contemplates the position of a woman who wants to control and manipulate the act of being observed, rather than just being the object of observation. Provocation, seduction and sexual manipulation on one side; diets, torturous exercise and plastic surgery on the other. How does this affect our self-image and intimacy?
Videos by Nataša Prosenc Stearns are moving collages based on image layering. Human body is central to her work, it is the logos/topos through which she observes, experiences, and understands her environment. Yet her works create a world that is not anthropocentric, but rather integrates the human body into everything that surrounds it. Te anatomy of the images is in flux, in perpetual mutation, transformative states, questioning the integrity of the body, integrity of the self, the impermanence and transitory nature of human condition, of all conditions.
The work probes our position in contemporary global world where there is a tendency for individualism and separation of mind and body, especially in an increasingly technologized environment, where many of us feel progressively more alienated from each other and from our physical selves.
Nataša Prosenc Stearns is an artist and filmmaker who graduated from the Department of Design at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. It is there that she created her first videos, and later installations and films. The Fulbright Grant took her to Los Angeles, where she obtained her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts. Her works have been showcased in Slovenian and international galleries and museums; her project Gladiators represented Slovenia at the 48th Venice Biennial and won her the Prešeren Foundation Award. She has received a series of other grants and awards, and appeared for the second time at the Venice Biennial in 2015 as part of the exhibition We Must Risk Delight, Twenty Artists from Los Angeles. Her works are found in national and international permanent exhibitions, in the archive of the DIVA Station at SCCA Ljubljana, while she is represented in the USA by Ruth Bachofner Gallery.
A day after the opening, on the 17. june 2017. we will be talking to the artist about the exhibition. The event will take place on the annual Museums on a Summer Night, at 6pm in UGM Studio, on Trg Leona Štuklja 2.
KINDLY INVITED!
