The Contemporary Art Gallery shows Frances Stark's "My Best Thing "

Written by Christine Wittwangle Wednesday, 01 February 2012 23:06

Vancouver, Canada.- The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present "My Best Thing" (2011), Frances Stark’s first feature-length animation. Initially presented in ILLUMInations at the 54th Venice Biennale, this recent work has rapidly gained critical attention. Using transcripts of an on-line relationship between Stark and two random strangers, the video unfolds to build an intimate portrait of the artist and her creative process. It continues Stark’s ongoing concerns with expectation and gender infused with notions of doubt, anxiety and musings on the general state of things. "My Best Thing" is on view at the gallery from February 3rd through April 15th. While arguably best known for her works on paper, where such issues are seen through the lens of writing, drawing and collage, her videos and performance pieces likewise comprise a forceful component in her overall artistic proposition. In "My Best Thing" two naked online avatars are pictured, a man and a woman, playmobil-like figures wearing discrete fig leaves for modesty.

The video traces the development of their relationship beginning as a series of discussions revolving around standard chat-room flirtatiousness. These encounters then give way to talk about film, art and subjectivity, touching on ideas surrounding history, politics and the very act of art-making itself. As the work progresses between two people initially unfamiliar to each other, the sexually oriented chat evolves into talk of them becoming potential collaborators. However, at this point of heightened acquaintance their relationship comes to an abrupt halt and conversation with a second person ensues. The artist’s exchange with each of her on-line counterparts is poignant and often comic, enhanced by the animation itself where Stark used Xtranormal, freely available 3D movie-making software, to render herself and her opposite number as cartoons, speaking in computer-generated accents transferred from actual dialogue. This is a compelling work that humorously and touchingly reflects on our changing world; a place where relationships mediated by technology challenge the usual understanding of how we interact with each other and allows new forms of behaviour to emerge. Stark continues to remind us of the complexity inherent in everyday encounters. Ideas of performance and role-playing, the anonymity versus intimacy implicit within the artist’s animation, are examined and brought into the wider philosophical discourse of subjectivity where strangers can so easily transform into confidantes.


Frances Stark was born in 1967, Newport Beach, California. She studied at San Francisco State University, San Francisco and Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California. She now lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (both 2010); Nottingham Contemporary (2009); Portikus, Frankfurt/Main and Wiener Secession, Vienna (both 2008); FRAC – Bourgogne, Dijon (2007); Artspace, San Antonio (2006). Recent group exhibitions include Restless Empathy, Aspen Art Museum, The Page, Kimmerich, New York; For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (all 2010); Picturing the Studio, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Poor. Old. Tired. Horse., Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; The Space of Words, MUDAM: Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (2009); Pretty Ugly, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; Word Event, Kunsthalle Basel and the Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum, New York (2008). My Best Thing was presented at the 54th Venice Biennale and has subsequently been screened at Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre, Alberta, The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London and Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles.

The Contemporary Art Gallery is dedicated to the research, exhibition, education and documentation of contemporary visual art as it is practiced locally through to internationally. It aspires to generate significant audiences for its innovative and diverse programmes through free access and a profile that is international in scope. The CAG aims to be perceived as a producer and transmitter of new ideas and activities, as a container for artistic experience. Radiating out from our centre in Vancouver, our programme seeks to signify an understanding of art as something of meaning in our daily lives, asserting a continuum, enmeshed within and of significance to all other experience. Established in 1971 as the Greater Vancouver Artist's Gallery, the CAG was incorporated in 1976 as a non-profit charitable society. Vancouver artists were hired for six month periods to produce art for exhibition at the gallery, and for inclusion in the City of Vancouver Art Collection. In 1984 the CAG became an artist-run centre. By the early 1990s the exhibition program had expanded to include national and international artists. In 1996 the CAG became the only independent public art gallery in downtown Vancouver. In May 2001, the CAG moved to a new purpose-built facility under the aegis of the City of Vancouver's Amenity Bonus program in cooperation with Bosa Ventures Inc. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://contemporaryartgallery.ca

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