Nataša Prosenc Stearns
Slovenian born visual artist and filmmaker Nataša Prosenc Stearns earned her BA at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. She moved to Los Angeles on a Fulbright Grant for her MFA at California Institute of the Arts. Her works range from single and multi-channel videos, video installations, short and feature films, video objects and print media. She is known for creative use of non-gallery spaces and large multi-channel installations.
Her films Souvenir, (released by Cinema Epoch), The Trial of Socrates, (collaboration of 23 filmmakers), Hotel Diary and others explore innovative strategies in storytelling and visual expression. She also completed a body of work for the opera Code L and for the theater play Misogyny. Recently she started experimenting with crypto art possibilities, expanding her practice into the metasphere.
Nataša represented Slovenia at the 48th Venice Biennale with her installation Gladiators for which she received The Prešern Fund Award, the national award for great achievement in art. She returned to the Biennale in 2015 as part of the group exhibition Twenty Artists from Los Angeles. She also exhibited in Douloun Museum of Art in Shanghai, ARCO Fair Madrid, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, Slovenia, Tel Aviv Museum of Art and in festivals such as SXSW, Films de femmes Paris, AVIFF Cannes, Brooklyn Film Festival, Chicago Independent Film Festival, Pacific Film Archives Berkeley, RedCat at Disney Music Hall in Los Angeles and others. She is a recipient of the Durffee and Soros Grants.
Nataša lives in Venice California and in Ljubljana Slovenia.
Nataša Prosenc Stearns | select exhibitions
2021
Caryatids | 5-channel installation, CAMERA OBSCURA Artist Residency
2019
Code L | video opera, Slovenia Opera House, Slovenia
CRAWLERS, THE LONG TRAVEL | 2 and 5-channel video installation, Portal Maribor, Slovenia
2018
White Gold | 2-channel video installation, Armory Center for the Arts, Los Angeles
Hotel Diary | 5-channel video installation, Rendon Gallery, DTLA Arts District, Los Angeles
Nataša Prosenc Stearns | select works
Dreamscape #1 – Lamento | 2019
Dreamscape #1 – Lamento was initially created for a new opera Code L, which premiered at the Slovenian National Opera House. “To experience the video art by Nataša Prosenc Stearns is to reawaken the sentient self, the body and perception as it meets the world prior to all thought and theory. Whereas the focus of much recent work tends to be conceptual and highly aware of its specificity and place of enunciation, Nataša pursues transcendent themes that extend well beyond the moment of her artwork’s existence”. wrote Holly Willis, a Los Angeles based media theoretician.
Dreamscape #1 – Lovers | 2019
A second in the series of video loops for the opera - Code L, inspired by Fragments of Lover's Discourse by French philosopher Roland Barthes, plows into elusive substance of fantasies and dreams of lovers. The moving images integrate human body with the organic world. The process of layering connects the visual elements and leads to fragments of narration.
Hotel Diary – Staircase | 2018
A long-forgotten encounter comes to life through fragments of real and imagined recollections. Longing, memories and nostalgia are at play in a chronicle of an affair, set in deserted interiors of a Los Angeles hotel. The protagonists, recorded separately in the same rooms, hallways and stairways, give impression of being together and apart at the same time, of being caught between the moments of arriving and leaving.
Untitled / Torso | 2016
Overlapping moving images of a female torso travel over the screen. Isolated from the rest of the body, the migration of layers creates a video collage, slowly shifting from figurative to abstract and back. A strong organic and corporeal charge changes into an optical surface through a ceremonial movement.
