Lynn Marie Kirby
Lynn Marie Kirby is a San Francisco based artist. Her projects begin with a deep personal (which is also often a political) resonance, often inspired by relation to place or family.
Her materials include everyday technologies and site intervention.
Each project requires a different set of research — including performative gatherings of histories, attention and attunement to people and sites often through a practice of listening, and an involvement with women at different stages of life. Other research practices include the use of archival material, public records, walking, collaboration, site intervention, and travel.She works in the gaps that occur between platforms and translation systems drawing attention to the way we see though contemporary technologies. For each project she develops a site related form through which to present the collected material to the public. Her most recent work uses scent to explore expanded embodied perception.
Occupied with questions of place, the residue of history, and liminal states, Kirby is engaged with seeing through different systems — both visible and hidden underpinnings. Her practice depends on improvisation and collaboration, accidents that make her jump, and forms of contemplation.
Her background in cinema, performance, and sculpture, allows the work to rove between media, from film to video to web-based platforms and handheld devices, from screen to installation. The projects often include poetic and associative experimental text, in take away broadsheets or books that provide another dimension to the project.
In addition to the site embedded work of the last few years, Kirby’s work has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums, a selection from the last fifteen years includes: KADIST, Paris and San Francisco, 2017; Art in Embassies, Belgrade, Serbia, 2016; LACMA, Los Angeles, 2015; Fei Contemporary, Shanghai, 2014; Manresa Gallery, San Francisco, 2014; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, 2012; Brava Theater, San Francisco, 2012; Bio Paradis, Reykjavik, 2011; Berkeley Art Museum, 2011; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2011; Wattis Institute, San Francisco, 2010; Getty, 2008; Art in Embassies, Chisinau, Moldova, 2007; Strasbourg Museum of Contemporary Art, 2017; Pompidou Centre, Paris, 2007; Manage Festival, St. Petersburg, 2006; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2003; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 1999.
Kirby’s films and videos have screened at festivals around the world, including Toronto, 2011; San Francisco, 2006; London, 1995; Athens. 1994; Oberhausen, 1990. Generous foundations have supported her work, including the San Francisco Arts Commission, 2014 and 2011; US State Department Art in Embassies, 2015 and 2011; Djerassi Fellowship, 2007; Kelsey Street Press, 1999; Guggenheim Fellowship, 1998; California College of the Arts faculty development grants, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2008, 2006, 2004.
After studying in Paris, Stockholm, and Cambridge, Kirby received a BFA in Sculpture, 1977, followed by an MFA in Film, 1980, San Francisco Art Institute. She has an MFA in writing from California College of the Arts, 2016.
Kirby is a Professor of Fine Arts and Film at California College of the Arts.