Frances Stark "My Best Thing"

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Courtesy the artist, Marc Foxx, Los Angeles; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York City; Greengassi London; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne

Frances Stark "My Best Thing", 2011

Frances Stark "My Best Thing", 2011Digital video, duration 99 mins,

Frances Stark

My Best Thing

February 3 to April 15, 2012

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents Frances Stark’s first feature length animation My Best Thing. Premiered at last year’s 2011 Venice Biennale this compelling work is presented as a large scale projection in the Alvin Balkind Gallery at the CAG.

Stark lives and works in Los Angeles and through both writing and visual art, addresses the conditions of creative labour producing candid and touching work about the nature of artistic practice corresponding to the everyday. 

In My Best Thing Stark uses actual transcripts of on line sex-chat room discussions between herself and random strangers to build an intimate portrait of the artist and her creative process. The video traces the development of their relationships beginning as typical sexual encounters then progressing into conversations about film, art and subjectivity. Their poignant conversations are often comic, heightened by the animation itself where Stark uses Xtranormal, free 3D-movie making software, to render her figure and her male counterpart as cartoons, naked except for the modest placement of fig leaves, speaking in computer-generated accents.

1)      February 2^nd from 7-10pm public opening and celebration where artist Francis Stark will be in attendance.

2)      Artist Talk held at Emily Carr University with Frances Stark on Friday, February 3^rd at 7pm.

3)      Book Signing: following the talk Stark will sign copies of her new publication that accompanies the exhibition with commissioned text by Mark Godfrey, Curator, Tate Modern. Co-published by the Contemporary Art Gallery, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff and Koenig Books.