Meredyth SparksWindows and Screens

The Arts Club of Chicago is pleased to announce Meredyth Sparks’s first solo exhibition in Chicago. Sparks (b. 1972) is best known for layering materials like glitter, vinyl, and aluminum foil over images drawn from pop culture and the historical avant-garde. At The Arts Club, she exhibits new and defining works from an ongoing series of photo-based collages titled Extraction. They combine decorative or outmoded textiles with found photographs of mundane domestic objects like window frames and lattice screens.

Since 2010, Sparks has been engaged in a project of simplification and distillation. Having come into her own with a body of work that pitted diverse characters of 1970s pop and political culture like David Bowie or the Baader-Meinhof activist Gudrun Ensslin against icons of art history like Kazimir Malevich, Sparks began to excise forms from what had become a cacophonous field. She has explained that the idea of “extraction” begins “by taking away from an image or object, while also in its very realization, intimating what remains.” Cut-and-paste had always been central to her collage-based practice, but the acts of separation and reconstitution now became essential. At the same time, Sparks’s imagery shifted from things known through celebrity and fandom to things known through familiarity and use. The resulting works stitch together enlarged found photographs of household objects, which are digitally printed on canvas and then carefully cut away from their settings, with expanses of decorative fabric and small patches of illusionistic painting. The patterns of the fabric then act as predetermined surfaces that fill the dimensions of the missing room, while the painted areas assert the artist’s presence.

Sparks is deeply indebted both to the historical avant-garde and to feminist practice. Her labor-intensive acts of cutting and sewing, choice of ornate fabrics like toile, and uncanny ability to make something almost beautiful, but not quite, tie her to a tradition of women’s work that was defined in the 1970s. She thinks deeply about how to renew that feminist impulse by engaging the radical interventions of the early 20th century. The radiator motif that helped launch the Extraction series harkens back to the generating love machine of Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass, as it converts liquid water into steam heat. Sparks further nods to Duchamp’s glass construction through the motif of the window—which in this case, comes with tacky blinds or encasements fitted for a basement. The transparency here occurs not in the glass, but in literal gaps between the fabric, where Sparks has allowed a view through to the stretcher bars and supporting wall. In this way, she opens a space of meaning behind the picture plane, while mimicking the revelation of interiority suggested by the structure of household things.

Meredyth Sparks lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has a BFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and an MFA from Hunter College, New York. She has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris (2013 forthcoming, 2009, 2006); Locust Projects, Miami (2012); Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York (2011, 2010, 2008); Veneklasen/Werner, Berlin (2011); Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels (2009); and Projects in Art & Theory, Cologne (2009). Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at such institutions as Saatchi Gallery, London (2012); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2012); ICA Boston (2011); Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham (2010); CAPC musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux, France (2010); Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2010); Turner Contemporary Project Space, Kent, UK (2009); Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago (2008); PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2006); and The Kitchen, New York (2006).