Chicago Art Institute to Open FRANCES STARK: INTIMISM Multimedia Exhibit, 5/21

CHICAGO-The Art Institute announces the opening of Frances Stark: Intimism, the first comprehensive survey of Stark's video and digital production. Part of the Art Institute's focus series, the exhibition goes on view from May 21, 2015, through August 30, 2015, in Galleries 182-186 and the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries. Stark will also take up residency on the museum's Instagram account (@artinstitutechi) during the week leading up to the opening.

For more than two decades, Frances Stark's art practice has gauged the intersections of her art and her life in a diverse range of interdisciplinary media-from essays, drawings, and iPhone photographs to moving-image work, performances, and PowerPoint presentations. Most broadly, Stark (American, born 1967) focuses on the working life of an artist where it overlaps with the non-working life of an artist, and vice versa. She has garnered acclaim as one of the few contemporary artists to use the tools of digital and culture with both humor and urgency, revealing how either personal necessity or aimless browsing can become fonts of discovery, connection, and ultimately incisive narrative. In all her work, she has a gift for balancing intimate content with a sense of theatricality.

Associate Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art Kate Dillon Nesin gave context to that balance, saying, "Frances Stark is blazingly honest-equal parts courageous and audacious-creating work that is as much about self-assessment as about self-exposure." Nesin added, "From her prescient, lo-fi Cat Videos, begun in 1999, through slideshows derived from her Instagram feed, @therealstarkiller, Stark explores the confessional mode as a way to mine the pressures of self-presentation in today's art-and online-worlds."

The word Intimism, the title of Stark's exhibition, often refers to late 19th- and early 20th-century French paintings of small-scale, jewel-like domestic interiors. Stark's work renews and expands the term's historical reference to richly decorated and quietly inhabited spaces, challenging viewers to consider questions of privacy, affinity, proximity, and intimacy within contemporary culture.

Related Events

Conversation: Frances Stark
May 21, 2015
6:00pm-7:00pm
Nichols Board of Trustees Suite
Free for Illinois residents; free for other visitors with museum admission.
No registration required; seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.

Opening Reception: Frances Stark: Intimism
May 21, 2015
7:00pm-8:00pm
Bluhm Family Terrace
Free for Illinois residents; free for other visitors with museum admission.
No registration required.

Gallery Talks: Exhibition Overview of Frances Stark: Intimism
May 29, 2015
12:00pm-1:00pm
Meet in Griffin Court, Modern Wing
Free with museum admission.

August 18, 2015
12:00pm-1:00pm
Meet in Griffin Court, Modern Wing
Free with museum admission.

Screenings: Frances Stark, My Best Thing (2011)
June 11, 2015
August 27, 2015
6:00 pm
Price Auditorium
Free for Illinois residents; free for other visitors with museum admission.
No registration required.

Images:

Frances Stark. Installation view, Bobby Jesus's Alma Mater b/w Reading the Book of David and/or Paying Attention Is Free, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown's enterprise, New York. Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Purchased jointly by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago with funds provided by Marshall Field's by exchange and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Copyright the artist. Photography: Mark Woods.

Frances Stark. Still frame, this is not exactly a cat video: w/ David Bowie's "Star Man," 2006. Image courtesy the artist.

Frances Stark, From therealstarkiller #1609, 2015. Archival inkjet print, 7 x 7 inches. Courtesy the artist.

Sponsors

Ongoing support for focus exhibitions is provided by the Alfred L. McDougal and Nancy Lauter McDougal Fund for Contemporary Art.

Additional support is provided by The Neisser Family Foundation.