Frances Stark - Lauren

I went to the exhibit earlier this week and it was my first time to the List Gallery. I was glad that it was a larger exhibit than the BHCC yet again i was the only person there and i could take my time. I purposely went into the exhibit not knowing anything about Frances Stark. I wanted to attempt to interpret her works without any outside influence. From the first few pieces that i saw, it is clear that Stark likes to play with the english language and words. Many pieces are passages from books that are copied onto paper. I surmise that this is her way of reexamining these works and finding art in the beauty of language itself. In some pieces, she uses just single letters or parts of words cut out and made into a collage like in this one where the bird is on a lettered branch.

Many of her other works include her self portrait in the act of creating the art itself. I feel as if she is pointing out how art is construction and not unlike other day to day chores and rituals we do everyday. It almost makes it feel mundane. These pieces also feel more personal because you get a glimpse of what this person looks like.

Stark uses mixed media for many of her creations. Lots of paper with text cut out and pasted on and junk mail. The junk mail ones have strips of the catalogs, envelopes, bills, and other superfluous garbage that we all receive in the mail everyday melded together to form some sort of collage or other object. The piece, "In and In", shows piles of these collaged strips stacked on the whole canvas. I believe she is commenting on the absurdity of all of the junk we have to sort through everyday to get to the stuff that is important. This can relate to all aspects of life since most of our days consist of routines that really don't matter in the grand scheme of life. The clutter can be overwhelming however.

Stark also had a video and a power point. These two i wasn't as interested in. That is just a personal preference and to me these were difficult to grasp the concept behind them. She also had a fun costume that was a rotary phone. I'm not sure what this is supposed to represent other then how antiquated the rotary phone is. It shows that she has talent in many different media. Overall, I found the exhibit to be quite enjoyable. I liked her larger more complicated pieces the best and think she has a unique point of view of what art is.

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!

Frances Stark Review - Anne Kane

I enjoyed viewing the work of Frances Stark at the MIT List Gallery. Her work is mainly collages. She seems to also like to use black and white stripes which really stands out. I like the fact that she uses multiple materials. She uses fabric and magazine cutouts as well as a shiny metallic texture. She also uses a lot of text that sometimes spells out words and sometimes does not.

Her work is somewhat technically simplistic compared to other artists. However simple is not a bad thing. I learned that she was also a writer and a poet. This explains her broad use of text and the written word in her work.

Her use of collage is multilayered and the parts create a whole. I equally enjoyed her pieces that were in black and white as well as color. Some of my favorite pieces were the peacock, the metallic dresser near the beginning of the gallery and the 3D telephone made of black fabric near the end.

Frances Stark

Am I Dumb ?

Or just incapable of appreciating art ? This was the most recurrent thought during my trip to the gallery.

I really hope we don't get graded by the depth of our thoughts about the artist and its artwork or by the length of our review, otherwise I am in deep trouble.

Lets start by reviewing the only picture I was allowed to take.

This might have been the only part I understood, pretty self explanatory so no pictures !!!!

In general when trying to appreciate art I look for something that even if I don't like I can deem as unique or in which the amount of work it took to conceive or create is admirable. Sometimes I don't get anything from an artist, very sadly I have to say that is what I got from Frances Stark. I dint find any of its pieces to be sassy, bold or particularly creative or innovative, even more I found that many of its pieces follow a very repetitive pattern (specially the ones with text in it). This wouldn't represent a major issue if I related or liked or even understood the artist which I didn't, maybe as a consequence of not understanding the time and situation in which this work took place for the artist which he mentioned was very important to relate to his work.

But frankly not one thing captured my attention, not the colors, materials, creativity or work behind its pieces. I felt that any of his works (with maybe two exceptions of its painting) could have been done by anyone.

I might be to critic but it is because I went to this exposition with big expectations, I might be paying my frustration for not being able to get what so many people do, that I might be redirecting the feeling towards a bad critic.

I believe anything can be observed and considered as art, so no artist could ever be wrong with any piece he creates, but I also believe that the reaction these art pieces create can't ever be wrong either. I really tried to get something from her pieces, but trying so hard only irritated me which later on transformed into and anger feeling toward its work.

The first part of my review was wrote just after returning from the exposition. Before publishing I kept thinking why I had such a bad reaction to her art and realize that something Mrs Stark said is true, we need to understand the moment and time in which a piece is created, I believe my mood at the time of the exposition really influenced my perception on her work and made me realize how our emotions clearly influence our perception on everything.

“It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors”

Oscar Wilde