Meredyth Sparks, Visiting Artist Lecture

Born 1972, Panama City, FL

Lives and works in New York, NY

Meredyth Sparks' densely layered collages and paintings are uncanny formalist inventions existing somewhere between figuration and abstraction. Her practice is informed by an array of sources within radical politics, music, the historical avant-garde and the ever-evolving legacies of labor and gender.  Sparks’ work engages the territories of decoration, design, historic and artistic modernism(s) and appropriation through a formal and conceptual approach she has termed “extraction.”  “Extraction” necessitates the central gesture of the cut, foregrounding the gap between the represented and the real, what is visible and what remains hidden.

Sparks’ work has been widely exhibited in international gallery and museum contexts.  Her solo exhibitions include Windows and Screens, The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago; Striped Bare, Veneklasen/Werner, Berlin; Extraction, Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York and We were strangers for too long., Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris.  Group exhibitions include Test Pattern, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Out of Focus, Saatchi Gallery, London; The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, ICA, Boston; CACP, ou la vie saise par l’art, CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux; I am a cliché, Les Recontres d’Arles Photographie, Arles; From Shop Window Mannequin to Media Star, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela and The 2^nd Moscow Biennial. 

Sparks was born in Panama City, FL.  She earned her BFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and her MFA from Hunter College, New York.  Sparks lives and works in Queens, NY.