Caryatids loops as individual iterations and each work can be sequenced into 'video colonnades'.
Traditionally, a caryatid is an architectural column, which takes the form of a standing female figure. The most celebrated ones are found in the Acropolis of Athens. Caryatids represent the power and endurance of women and have been used as a motif by artists and architects throughout history.
Nataša Prosenc Stearns’ videos bring the idea of caryatids into our time with silhouettes of women layered by the elements of contemporary Los Angeles architecture. The images progress from individual figures through archetypal female forms to semi-abstract shapes, suggesting androgyny, imperfection, even disfigurement. Once immobile female pillars now beam with turbulence; wind in their hair and clothes.
Confirming their significance in today’s changing gender landscape, they resist the confinement of the orthogonal masculine shapes of the architectural grids. They no longer carry buildings and decorate facades. In the words of Breda Kolar Sluga, the curator of the initial video installation of Caryatids at the UGM Studio in Maribor Slovenia, “they connect the sky and the earth, confirming their role in a cosmological integrity”.
Featuring Cigdem Akbay, Hannah Beadman, Jen Ferguson, Diana Hobstetter, Elizabeth Johnson, Amy Kaps, Gina Levy, Marissa Lyn, Rita Obermeyer, Vania Ouzounova, Alenka Pavlin, Stephanie Reuler, Michaela von Schweinitz, Kim Suarez Secoquian, Erika Tai, Maria Greenshields-Ziman, Jess Ziman, Sofia Ziman.
Music by Digifish.
