Frances Stark Exibition review by Max (Yu Sun)

I went to MIT List Gallery this week after some one told me art works there were a little bit conceptual and hard to understand. Well, my life is full of challenges and I am willing to explore and solve puzzles.

The first impression of the exhibition is that the style is more unified than the "Artists' Books show", I think the main reason is because it is a single artist exhibition. But there are still a lot of diversity nested in the exhibition, for instance, various of materials, various of way of assembling. Also, based on these differences, my emotion can be affected by the author's emotion at the time he was creating them.

Let me started with one of my favorite piece of Frances Stark's works. The name of that piece is "Toward a Score for Load every rift with ore", and I am so lucky that I found it online. The first thing I love about this art is the sources. Stark used daily life materials like letters, shipping labels, recipes to make the collage, and drew a chair in the middle of the collage. I have a feeling that I am sitting on the black chair and trying to handle my everyday life. It is the true feeling, not just from a printed pictures. Second, I was thinking about why he cut all those papers in to incomplete chunks? My very own answer is that he wanted to leave the audience some sort of imagination about the art work, I may say "Nothing is perfect."

The second one I want to mention is the one named "Pretty Ugly". The painting is a portrait girl. When I saw it for the first time with its title on it, I thought that was really ugly. But when I double checked it, I saw the girl's face were formed by flowers. And I think that is why the author called the painting Pretty Ugly. I have to admit the word "ugly" was really leading me to a wrong place at first. But fine arts needed to be watch carefully from itself.

Also, there was one piece that interested me. It was a piece of yellow paper, with a computer directory tree on it. The sub-directory was full of MS Word file. And I found one special file hidden among those Word files. That really took me some time to figure out what was that, and what is the massage the author wanted to pass.

There were few questions in my mind when I am done seeing the exhibition. Most of Frances Stark's artworks I saw were made with daily materials, and he always put things that have nothing relation to each other together to form a new object. The object could be a daily life stuff, or even a creative, assembled invention. But why is the artist think that way? How could he managed to put those stuff together? Were the ideas coming to his mind directly by some inspiration, or he was intentionally doing so? But anyway, Spark's works really give those daily matters a new life, and make them three-dimensioned other than laying on a 2D paper.

That is a great exhibition!