LOS ANGELES, CA.- Slovenian-born visual artist and filmmaker, Nataša Prosenc Stearns, will present her latest works, Caryatids, a collection of large prints featuring architectural columns which take the form of the standing female figures. The exhibition, now running through June 16, at Mauro Café, 8112 Melrose Avenue, is organized in collaboration with SEEfest, the South East European Film and Cultural Festival.

Taking the motifs from ancient Greece, and Acropolis of Athens, Caryatids represent the power and endurance of women. This project brings the idea of caryatids into our time with silhouettes of women layered with elements of contemporary Los Angeles architecture.

"I am excited to share these images with L.A. audiences," says Nataša Prosenc Stearns. "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; they connect the sky and the earth, confirming their role in a cosmological integrity."

Says Evelyne Joan, proprietor of Mauro Café, “It is very meaningful to me to be able to showcase this collection of Prosenc Stearn’s photographs that explore the role of women as pillars of community. As a woman and owner of an iconic food and hospitality establishment in Los Angeles, I have always been an avid supporter of local artists. It is a privilege to celebrate Prosenc Stearn’s artistic achievements especially in concurrence with International Women’s Month.”

As noted by the academic Stefan Mattessich, "Prosenc Stearns, like Yeats, approaches the problems of modern subjectivity by situating it (and us) in the deeper historical contexts of an ambivalent “civilising process.” Where Yeats, in “The Second Coming,” dates this process from the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem (where that “rocking cradle” would be located), Prosenc Stearns takes us back to classical Greece, to the myths and principles that still today underlie what it is to be a person who is autonomous, self-governing, and “free” in the (categorical) imperatives of an exigent and intimate self-discipline—one beginning in an infancy as much our own as it is that of the modernity we live, and live less as a secularizing break than in continuity with our pre-modern past."

Caryatids digital video iterations have been released as mineable NFTs on the digital platform Sedition (the oldest digital platform, featuring works by Jenni Holzer, Yoko Ono, Bill Viola, Shepard Fairey, Rioyi Ikeda, Christian Boltanski and Wim Wenders).

Nataša Prosenc Stearns

Nataša earned her BA at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana. She moved to Los Angeles on a Fulbright Grant for her MFA at California Institute of the Arts. Her body of work ranges from single-channel videos, video installations, short and feature films to prints. She explores innovative strategies in storytelling and visual expression and is known for creative use of non-gallery spaces and large multi-channel installations. As an exiled female artist, her areas of artistic exploration include alienation and identity in a technology- and profit-driven environments. By layering moving images, she has developed a singular visual language that integrates seemingly unrelated spaces and figures. It also allows her to explore another of her favorite topics - the interconnectedness and unity of all things.

Nataša's work has been shown internationally, including at the Venice Biennale and at numerous galleries and museums such as the Douloun Museum of Art in Shanghai, the ARCO Fair in Madrid, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid, and the Museum of Modern Art in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Her videos and films have been screened at festivals such as SXSW, Films de femmes Paris, AVIFF Cannes, the Brooklyn Film Festival, and the Chicago Independent Film Festival. She is a recipient of The Soros Grant, The Durfee Grant, The European Capital of Culture Grant and The Prešeren Fund Award - the Slovenian award for outstanding achievement in art. Her videos are also featured in the contemporary opera CodeL. natasastearns.com.