Frances Stark
The Art Institute of Chicago
For all its investment in media technology, “Intimism,” the first survey to home in on Frances Stark’s digitally based work, was at its heart a writerly exhibition. Stark weaves text through numerous media, from drawing to video to (in this instance) the museum’s Instagram feed, even applying something like an essayistic approach to designing her exhibition layouta strategy that Charles Ray, an early mentor, once described to the artist as “writing in space.” While the resulting show readily displayed Stark’s playfulness and undeniable joie de vivre, it had an equally undeniable dark