CHICAGO, IL.- The Art Institute announces the opening of Frances Stark: Intimism, the first comprehensive survey of Stark’s video and digital production. Part of the Art Institute’s focus series, the exhibition is on view from May 21, 2015, through August 30, 2015, in Galleries 182-186 and the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries.

For more than two decades, Frances Stark’s art practice has gauged the intersections of her art and her life in a diverse range of interdisciplinary media—from essays, drawings, and iPhone photographs to moving-image work, performances, and PowerPoint presentations. Most broadly, Stark (American, born 1967) focuses on the working life of an artist where it overlaps with the non-working life of an artist, and vice versa. She has garnered acclaim as one of the few contemporary artists to use the tools of digital and culture with both humor and urgency, revealing how either personal necessity or aimless browsing can become fonts of discovery, connection, and ultimately incisive narrative. In all her work, she has a gift for balancing intimate content with a sense of theatricality.

Associate Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art Kate Dillon Nesin gave context to that balance, saying, “Frances Stark is blazingly honest—equal parts courageous and audacious—creating work that is as much about self-assessment as about self-exposure.” Nesin added, “From her prescient, lo-fi Cat Videos, begun in 1999, through slideshows derived from her Instagram feed, @therealstarkiller, Stark explores the confessional mode as a way to mine the pressures of self-presentation in today’s art—and online—worlds.”

The word Intimism, the title of Stark’s exhibition, often refers to late 19th- and early 20th-century French paintings of small-scale, jewel-like domestic interiors. Stark’s work renews and expands the term’s historical reference to richly decorated and quietly inhabited spaces, challenging viewers to consider questions of privacy, affinity, proximity, and intimacy within contemporary culture.