Staying at Home with Zbirka UGM / Nataša Prosenc Stearns - The Coast
Staying at Home with Zbirka UGM / Nataša Prosenc Stearns - The Coast
The Coast is a short digital video, a series of frames depicting everyday life in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, where Slovene video artist and film director Nataša Prosenc Stearns has lived since the 1990s. The video switches between wild chaotic scenes and calm, almost desolate images of this vast coast in strong, powerful colours, with a slightly grainy structure and dimmed perspective. Prosenc shot The Coast after she had completed her post-graduate studies in film and video at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles (1999) and had already made her first Hollywood feature film. Prior to her American experience, Prosenc worked mainly as a video artist. She based her work on the performative body and developed abstract ambient environments in her video installations. After her Hollywood experience the artist’s interest in experimenting with film as both tool and language grew – and reflected in her work. In The Coast, Prosenc combined the use of a digital camera with a film lens, together with an adaptor to convert the film image into a digital signal and in the process developed her own recording technique. Apart from the technical side The Coast is to some extent the artist's homage to her favourite director Eric Rohmer, the French New Wave filmmaker known for, among others, his scenes featuring sunny beaches and vast stretches of clear blue sky.
