Between Body and Space IV: Black Waters

The fourth programme of the review of Nataša Prosenc Stearns' film/video oeuvre continues the third strand, focusing even more on her gallery works or installations and thus revealing the archiving of gallery works. This gives us further insight into the artist's work in the installation field, both in a gallery context and in a theatre context, where the installation becomes the set design for the opera code L, where she combined different images on translucent screens. At the same time, there will also be some works that emerge from the gallery installation but also live on as video/film, such as Crawlers, Emergent Fossils or Dreamscape #1: Lovers, as well as works such as Suspended Colonnade, where the line between the two forms is further blurred.

Vortex

projection documentation, Wallspace, Los Angeles, ZDA, HD Video, 16:9, colour, 2013, 4′ 21"

Detail from the four-channel video installation Gladiators. A series of images of fire, earth, sand, and snow rotating and disappearing in a circular motion.


Backfill

video installation, ECC, Maribor Castle, Maribor Regional Museum, Slovenia, HD Video, 16:9, colour, 2012, 3′ 27"

The artist originally conceived the video installation for an in-situ installation during the European Capital of Culture Maribor art events in the bastion of the Maribor Regional Museum. The video installation is a reflection of a new historical space. The artist brought the entire space to life with three parallel projections of falling stones, earth, and gravel. The artist was led to earth materials by reflecting on the history of medieval construction. Still, she has made a work in which layers of history come poetically to life as avalanches of geological debris.


Crawlers, The Long Travel

video installation, Monfort Gallery, Portorož / Coastal Galleries Piran, Portal Maribor, Slovenia, HD Video, 16:9, colour, 2016, 2′ 49"

A video made especially for the installation, first installed in the Monfort exhibition space in Portorož, with scenes of human bodies in motion, reminiscent of reptiles. They follow each other in a familiar rhythm that connects them and, at the same time, blends them into the environment. The images are partly abstracted: the bodies and the background are flattened into a single moving structure. Similar to the artist's other projects in recent years, which focus on authentic experiences of physical existence, test the limits of the body's capacities and offer the possibility of the body's supernatural abilities, this installation is a response to the growing anxiety and loneliness caused by retreating into disembodied cyberspace. In the spirit of the belief that most of the answers are hidden precisely in our bodies' sensations, vibrations, pleasures and pains, these works struggle for the survival of the felt, the authentic and the mysterious.


Emergent Fossils

video installation loop, USA, Novo Celje Mansion, HD Video, 16:9, colour, 2016, 8′

Video is a part of Black Waters and Other Stories series - short videos with no narrative structure.


Black Waters and Other Stories

exhibition documentation, Prešeren Award Winners Gallery, Kranj, Slovenia, HD Video, 16:9, colour, 2016, 5′ 11"


Dreamscape #1: Lovers

USA, HD Video, 16:9, colour, 2019, 7' 23"

Dreamscape #1 – Lovers is a moving collage which integrates the human body with the organic world. The process of layering connects visual elements and leads to fragments of narration. Inspired by A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes, the video ploughs into the elusive substance of fantasies and dreams of lovers—music from the opera code L by Milko Lazar.


Suspended Collonade

video installation, Regional Museum Maribor, Slovenia, HD Video, 16:9, colour, 2018, 2′ 27"

The video shows a floating female figure, multiplied in numerous variations, creating repetitions of her own image in the rhythm of colonnades. Artistically, the image avoids banality through a transition from a specific figural appearance into abstraction and back again. It resembles the colonnades of Antiquity, while the switching of the internal space into external space in the video brings to mind the colonnade designed by the architect Jože Plečnik around the sadly never realised Cathedral of Freedom.


code L - Fragments

videoinstallation, KiBela, Maribor, Slovenia, HD Video, 16:9, color, 2019, 1′ 59"

code L – Fragments is a video installation created by two synchronized projections onto transparent screens. They integrate shadows and silhouettes of visitors and reflections of the architectural elements into the body of the installation. What emerges is a space-inside-of-space into which the visitors enter. According to the curator Peter Tomaž Dobrila, “The artist used to place humans at the centre of the natural environment in her earlier works, reappropriating the image of the human body by emphasizing certain parts, such as eyes. In her recent works, however, the human figure blends with the environment; it becomes a body-shadow, moving across the given ambience. The internalization of this relationship unravels the corporeality, unlocks the interior, and highlights the intimacy of the experience. The figures are abstracted into ephemeral creatures, who transcend into eternity of existence and offer the viewer a space for reflection.”


White Gold

video installation, Kresija Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia, Armory Center for the Arts, Los Angeles, USA, HD Video, 16:9, colour, 2014, 2′ 10"

The video installation consists of projections of stylised human figures onto the sugar cube (2 X 2 X 2 m). Although sugar has been tarnished recently for health reasons, it has played an important role in history. It has been as important a commodity as oil is today, shaping world geopolitics and the economies of the most critical countries wherever sugar cane thrives.


Hotel Diary

video installation, Gallery Velenje / Gallery Božidar Jakac / The Rendon Gallery / Strada Los Angeles, Velenje / Kostanjevica na Krki / Los Angeles, Slovenia / USA, HD Video, 16:9, colour, 2016 / 2018 / 2020-, 4′ 29"

A video installation of a series of videos entitled Hotel Diary was displayed together with a Golden Curtain video installation at the exhibition at Velenje Gallery in 2016. Videos were recorded with a static camera in an abandoned hotel in Los Angeles to capture the atmosphere of memories and stories. It is a part of a series of videos entitled.


Innocence Disolved

Kanalya Pictures, video installation, Phantom Galleries / LACMA (Tarfest) / Wallspace Gallery / SCCA Project Room, Los Angeles / Ljubljana, HD Video, 16:9, colour, USA / Slovenia, 2008 / 2010 / 2012 / 2013, 2′

Video is a documentation of the same-named exhibition - installation, where two looped videos are projected on a gallery window and a bed. The rolling dolls with perky plastic cheeks and the soft, sad-eyed plush pets in this installation invoke a deeply buried nostalgia for the loss of an affective sense of materiality that is, paradoxically, generated by the post-industrial hyper-production of "things." As our environment is cluttered with an unprecedented excess of material objects, our culture witnesses a steadily dissolving ability to infuse these objects with emotion. It is this emotional investment that animates our relationship with objects and with materiality as such.


Sky is Earth

video object, MF Gallery, Los Angeles, USA, HD Video, 16:9, colour, 2017 / 2024, 1′ 52"

Trees of Savannah, water, stream, wind. Part of a series of five video objects with the common title Parallax.


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