Scott Stark

Scott Stark

Fellow: Awarded 2007
Field of Study: Film

Competition: US & Canada

Scott Stark has produced more than sixty films and videos since 1980. Additionally, he has created a number of gallery and non-gallery installations using film and video, and elaborate photographic collages using large grids of images. Born and educated in the Midwest, he has always been interested in aggressively pushing his work beyond the threshold of traditional viewing expectations, challenging the audience to question its relationship to the cinematic process; yet he also tries to build into the work elements of humor and incongruity that allow the viewer an entryway into the work while maintaining a critical distance. Both a passionate purist and a cynical skeptic, he likes to emphasize the physicality of film while cross-referencing it to the world outside the theater, attempting to lay bare the paradoxes of modern culture and the magical nature of the perceptual experience.

Mr. Stark’s films and videos have shown locally, nationally, and internationally, including recent one-person shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Pacific Film Archive. His films have won several awards, including four Black Maria awards, and he recently received a San Francisco Bay Guardian Goldie Award. In 2007, he was a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, in addition to his Guggenheim Fellowship.

He has taught art classes at the San Francisco Art Institute (where he also earned his M.F.A.), interweaving nontraditional uses of film and video with a variety of art disciplines. Mr. Stark served for seven years on the board of the San Francisco Cinematheque, during which time, among many other contributions, he cofounded the Cinematheque’s journal of film and media art, Cinematograph.

Mr. Stark has worked in a variety of motion picture media, including 8mm, super-8mm, 16mm, and video. Several of his films introduced a novel technique in which he ran movie film through a still camera, which, when projected, produces collage-like barrages of images and odd optically generated soundtracks. He calls these films the Chromesthetic Response Series.

Scott Stark makes his living as a computer programmer and support specialist for a large multinational corporation. He currently lives in Austin, Texas. He is the author of the online Flicker pages.

 

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