Jeremy Stern



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Recent Statements

Contact for more information: jeremydraw@gmail.com

FOLLOWING
Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno
March 7 - 11, 2011

"The lit floor, painted gallery walls, your movement, and sounds from throughout the Truckee Meadows comprise the elements on view in Following.  My work reframes an existing situation, idea, or object so that the meaning reflects through the materials as well as the subject matter.  I often use maps as a touchstone to discuss how we form a sense of place through a personal experience of geography.  I find it difficult to avoid a discussion of how art, and therefore the art world, frames and mediates that experience.

To address this within the show, the Front Door Gallery, the Walter McNamara Gallery, and the current Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery, are unified by the muralized walls, whose “stars” are the visible history of the normally invisible 51-year history of their collective walls (Constellated Space, 2010 – 2011).  With lights on the grid of the gallery floor, your movement will reflect in the semi-gloss wall paint, connecting the dots through your viewership. Evocative of the Celestial Sphere, which travelers have used for centuries both to guide their passage and their myths, the walls of the gallery hold a history normally meant to be invisible, repaired clean for the next show. The moving silhouettes are a reminder that this history is most connected by the continued involvement of a curious audience, who carries the narrative of the gallery space forward through their open spirit of participation and learning.

By moving across the gallery’s floor, whose grid is transposed to scale onto a common Rand McNally road map, visitors will alter the composition of sounds made site-specific to the Truckee Meadows in which Reno sits (In Concert, 2010 – 2011). Inspired by an Instructables.com design of software developer Steve Struebing, we collaborated to make a number of devices that register and activate sound using photo-based sensors, Arduino microcontrollers and mp3 players. A second system, EyeCon, uses the Sheppard Gallery's in-house security system to monitor movement and play back site-specific recordings through the Gallery's sound system.  Visitor movement both triggers sounds from the Rand-McNally-mapped region and alters volumes of major individual elements, such as the flows of traffic and the Truckee River itself. These sound designs explore the challenges of this digital transition by removing visual identification of place, and ask that visitors explore first-hand, with their full body movements, the distortions that all maps create.

The romance of all that we dream of achieving through the personal integration of technology with our perception of lived experience is mediated by the vast gaps in first-hand experience that integration creates. In Following, we pay close attention to the full scope of our actions, embodied here in the acts of listening carefully and moving slowly.  By doing so we achieve the technology-based, social and ecological balance that seems to be the democratized hope of the increased availability of information to a general public. The work here rides a delicate line of embodying these ideals and the clash of distortion that it might also create."

 

COLORED SPACE
South Valleys Library, Reno, NV
March 20 - April 10, 2010

"This exhibition is comprised of framed watercolor paintings as well as cut maps from the series, Color As Possible Place, produced in 2009.  These works begin by editing popular map objects and their symbolic properties according to their inherent visual relationships. These edits are formal in appearance, eviscerating portions of information, or shapely features, to leave maps of absence.  In detailed road maps, this involves the removal of all names and numbers from the actual map, leaving only the bare indications of roads and generalized geographic boundaries.  The watercolor pieces play with the multiple layers of connotation that exist within the language of maps by applying color through the holes of excised spaces, using it as a template.  By removing all other elements, the applied color acts as the only indicator and descriptor of place.  The large maps reveal a unique allegory under direct lighting: pinned inches from the wall, an intricate lattice of shadow and color creates a secondary effect behind the foreground piece contingent on the lighting conditions of the space.

My larger body of work investigates notions of landscape, politics, and perception through a variety of media, in every case attempting to retain reflexivity between the addressed content and the material used.  In this pursuit I have found that maps of our environment claim a reflexive nature in conveying impressions of both our personal past and potential experience of any given mapped space. The watercolor and map pieces both address how maps “color” or distort the idea of experience for the map-reader, establishing a series of preconceived ideas of place before the viewer’s first-hand experience.   Colors themselves are often misconstrued as indicating aridity or lushness of a given landscape, when they might also indicate anything from zoning types to population density, as well as being reflective of the actual colors of the environment, depending on the source.  As maps often do, the work in Colored Space asks viewers to place themselves in what is missing, while simultaneously questioning the “givens” of any map."

March 11, 2010

 

NEGATIVE SPACES / POSITIVE PLACES
Sierra Arts Gallery, Reno, NV
November 16 - 25, 2009

"My work investigates notions of landscape, politics, and perception through a variety of media, in every case attempting to retain reflexivity between the content and the material of the work by way of process.  In this pursuit I have found that maps of our environment claim a similar reflexive nature in conveying impressions of both our personal past and potential experience of any given mapped space. As stories and maps often do, the work here asks viewers to place themselves in what is missing – and in this way, reveal that the act of a map maker is also the act of an editor. 

Much like an editor inserts his hand into a story by strengthening the author’s voice, so does the work in this exhibition attempt to heighten the viewer’s awareness of shared surroundings by editing popular map objects and their symbolic properties according to their inherent visual relationships. These edits are formal in appearance, eviscerating portions of information, or shapely features, to leave maps of absence.  In detailed road maps, this involves the removal of all names and numbers from the actual map, leaving only the bare indications of roads and generalized geographic boundaries.  Pinned several inches from the wall, these maps reveal a positive/negative allegory under direct lighting: an intricate lattice of shadows, and sometimes color, creates a secondary effect behind the foreground piece contingent on the lighting conditions of the space. The removal of spatial indicators and named (negative) space both propose a retrieval of place by the viewer.  A New USA addresses this directly by re-proposing our state borders as the already existing US Highway and Interstate road system.  Still in-progress, this work follows the current studies of critical cartographers, artists, and social theorists alike in discussing the mutability of our environment, the experiences we have within it, and how full view of those topics through discussion and resultant action will ultimately shape the best future for any given place. 

What happens when we are able to physically distinguish the mostly invisible world of political borders?  How will our involvement in political process naturally change?  Questions such as these, no matter how seemingly absurd, suggest a need to share a textured reading of the world, its mutual usage and multiple uses spread across our different imaginations and interpretations.  The work here invites that renewed experience – and it is only in this way that the former maps in NEGATIVE SPACES / POSITIVE PLACES become accurate depicters of place, experience and encounter, and not just formal, graphic-appropriated memories, speculations, or mere cause for nostalgia." 

November 16, 2009

     
     
JEREMYSTERNART.COM 2011