Lynn Marie Kirby’s work maps emotional topographies. She charts both the particularity of individual moments and cycles of lived, embodied existence, of life as a woman, of childhood, adolescence and family life. Her work creates links between people and histories of place. Kirby’s narratives are spatially configured, whether in film or interdisciplinary forms. Her work is ultimately about the structures we use to access our world and what we care most about in it.

Her work has been shown at film and video festivals including Oberhausen, Toronto, London and the Manege Festival in St. Petersburg, and museums including the Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art, New York and San Francisco, Olympic Museum, Sarajevo, the Pompidou Centre, Paris, Strasbourg Museum of Contemporary Art, Arsenal in Berlin, Portland Museum of Art, LACE in Los Angeles and the Kennedy Center and Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC.

Kirby’s work is included in the current Getty retrospective of California video and she has recently had retrospectives of her work at MOMA, NY, Chicago Filmmakers and the SF Cinematheque. She is a Guggenheim and Djerassi fellow, as well as an Art in Embassies fellow to Moldova in 2007. Ms. Kirby is a Professor of Fine Arts at the California College of the Arts.

Scanning back to Dionne Warwick
swapping & mapping

Scanning back to Dionne Warwick, brings together two realms of memory: public histories no longer visible in the landscape and private histories that will be made public.

The project starts at the site of the Infinite Exchange Gallery outside the Institute of Contemporary Art, in the Parc de los Pobladores, San Jose.

Visitors to the IEG are invited to enter into an exchange of histories of the now invisible. By providing a story about a moment in their own histories that is tied to a public space — lawn, park or building — that is now gone, visitors will receive a paper map walking tour of likewise past and invisible sites in San Jose. The walking tour guides visitors through parks and nearby streets and invites them to contemplate moments in the history of a San Jose no longer or never visible in the landscape.

Participants’ biographical stories will be scanned and then embedded into a Google Earth web page that links the stories to their original locations.

These two narratives, public historical moments in the history of a city, San Jose, and private moments, that have taken place in public spaces, in locations around the world, are collected in the web site, scanningbacktodionnewarwick.com

The project asks participants to reflect on the convergence of what is visible in the landscape today and what lies below the surface, the links between public and private, biographical and historical territories.