Libby Leshgold Gallery

The Contemporary Art Gallery and the Charles H. Scott Gallery present a talk by Frances Stark. Stark is a Los Angeles-based artist and writer whose practice is centered on language and the interrelation between graphic and textual materials. Her compositions often intertwine figurative imagery with repeated letters, words cut out of context, familiar literary passages, and quotidian detritus from the artist's studio space. Stark's process of creative production and her self-reflections are core subjects of her practice. Stark’s first feature-length animation, My Best Thing (2011), was initially presented in ILLUMInations at the 54th Venice Biennale and will be on display at the Contemporary Art Gallery from February 3 to April 15.


Following the talk the artist will be available to sign copies of her new publication Frances Stark My Best Thing which includes a comprehensive essay by British curator Mark Godfrey. The book is co-published by Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Koenig Books, London, and the Walter Philips Gallery, Banff.


Frances Stark received her Masters of Fine Arts from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California in 1993, and her undergraduate degree in Humanities from the San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California in 1991. She has exhibited widely. Her solo exhibition The Fall of Frances Stark, toured to Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; FRAC Bourgone, Dijon (2007); and Culturgest, Lisbon (2008). A retrospective But What of ‘Frances Stark,’ Standing By Itself, a Naked Name, Bare as a Ghost To Whom One Would Like to Lend a Sheet travelled to Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham (2009); and Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (2010). Stark has been featured in group exhibitions including Fit to Print: Printed Media in Recent Collage, Gagosian Gallery, New York (2007); Learn to Read, Tate Modern, London (2007); Poor. Old. Tired. Horse., ICA, London (2009); Following A Line, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; and All of This and Nothing, Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Stark is also the author of The Architect and the Housewife (1999); Collected Writings: 1993–2003 (2003), both published by Book Works, London. Her recent book, This Could Become a Gimick [sic] or an Honest Articulation of the Workings of the Mind is published by the MIT List Visual Arts Centre in 2011.

artwork

The artist Frances Stark, at right, with Skerrit Bwoy, from Put a Song in Your Thing.

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