Poets on the Pyre is a four-part video project, of which only part IV is present here. The work has been featured in the solo exhibition “Sorry for the Wait,” at greengrassi gallery in London, and “Intimism,” a survey exhibition of primarily digital and video works at the Art Institute of Chicago. Both exhibitions occurred in 2015.
“Stark herself has noted a harshness in the tone of her latest Instagram movies, a tone instituted partly through keen pacing and a driving rhythm. Indeed, aural and visual pulse and rhyme are of prime importance to all of Stark’s video and digital works. She conceives of the new Instagram movies, however, as a uniquely raw, knowing form of visual poetry — ‘rapping’ with images — the stakes of which are high. A writer herself, and an artist immersed in emerging (sometimes short-lived) modes of communication, Stark senses ‘that the fate of the poet or intellectual is an uncertain one.’ Her corresponding definition of poetry is crucially as well as historically expansive: the etymological root ofpoem is the ancient Greek verb for ‘to make.’ Despite being rigorously composed, whether as individual images or slide by slide, Stark’s Instagram works corroborate the uncertainty that both haunts and guides today’s ‘poets.'”
—- excerpted from the Art Institute of Chicago’s brochure accompanying the survey exhibition of Frances Stark’s work, titled Intimism, which ran from May-August 2015. Exhibition curated by Kate Nesin. Brochure text written by Kate Nesin, Associate Curator, Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, The Art Institute of Chicago.
