Georgina Starr (born 1968) is an English artist and one of the ‘Young British Artists’ (a group including Damien Hirst & Tracy Emin). She is best known for her video, sound, performance and installation works. Her work combines dream, fiction, memory and re-enactment. Starr's work has been described in Artforum magazine as exploring "the imaginative self’s ability to make something magically complex, layered and densely referential out of virtually nothing but its own ‘stuff'”
In Frenchy (1996) Starr plays a lonely teenager re-enacting a high school play. In The Hungry Brain (1995) a nightclub singer and a silent movie star in THEDA (2007-10) but I don’t get it. I don’t know why or what the point is.
Apparently her face and voice are always the focus, constantly changing and morphing as she performs. An Artforum critic says she is like all of the characters but none of them, familiar but unknowable and ‘proposes a model of art-making and combines the baroque with the spontaneous….the frame is fiction’.
I know Starr should seem relevant to my project, combing performance with video, with installation. I see things in the work that I love in Pippilotti Rist’s work, or Tracy Emin’s.
Hypnodreamdruff (1996), below, began as a film script, but turned into a multi-screen, multi-media installation incorporating a nightclub, bedroom, kitchen and caravan and the architect and artist in me is really engaged seeing the little worlds / rooms she has created, most with (performance) video’s incorporated. I love the exploration and interaction element of fantastic spaces set up in a gallery, yet again I just don’t get it. What is it trying to say. Described as a complex narrative of the ‘interior life’ of one of three fictional people sharing an apartment Hypnodreamdruff is as a ‘rowdy yet poignant portrait of the alienation and fantasy of everyday life’.
The aforementioned Frenchy and The Hungry Brain (below) are included. Dream Interference Device (above) does intrigue me - the kitchen of three London flatmates, with what looks like Starr playing all flatmates in the video, yet I couldn’t access that video. Im imagining something like ‘Big Brother’? The exhibition is ‘An amalgam of dream, memory, reenactment, and something like TV sitcom…’.
It might be the I am just tired, but I really don’t understand what Starrs work is about but appears ‘Avante-Garde’ to me. It’s always worth looking at artists and noting what I think I see, or that I don’t get it and possibly revisiting another time