Download catalogue PDF (also available in print from the gallery)

The Call and Response catalogue includes essays the following essays:

• nathaniel stern: the compressionist, by Clive Kellner, Director, Johannesburg Art Gallery
• narrating the database: the performative and iterative prints of nathaniel stern, by Wilhelm van Rensburg, Art Educator, University of Johannesburg

From Art on Paper’s press release:

“Nathaniel Stern exhibits the latest series of prints from his ongoing Compressionist studies. He ‘compresses’ bodies, spaces and objects by traversing their surfaces with an image scanner, virtually ‘tracing’ or performing their various 3-dimensional shapes. After these have been compressed into digital images the size of a small sheet of paper, the files are stretched, cropped and digitally colour manipulated.”

“These digital images are used as his ‘performative’ prints. They are ‘collected’ by hand with a custom-made scanner appendage and battery pack, often strapped around his neck, with which Stern scans images in straight, long lines across tables … swings over flowers, does pogo-like gestures over bricks, or just follows the wind over water lilies. The images become a digital archive from which Stern draws and selects and manipulates, to print with various photographic and inkjet processes.”

“These images have … been ‘iterated’ or repeated, utilizing traditional techniques such as etching, aquatint, engraving, monotype and lithography. Stern sometimes affectionately refers to these as ‘retro-Compressionist prints,’ produced with a ‘500-year-old digital process.’ On show are 17 archival lambda prints on metallic paper, as well as 13 hand-made works using traditional printmaking techniques.”