Bio

Darren Spirk is an artist and educator whose work is focused around the politics and poetics of sensation. Their mixed media practice spans photo, video, sound, text, sculpture, and installation.

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Their work starts in the throes of small, everyday intimacies and jumps scale to larger theoretical and political critiques of our very structures of relation, feeling, and worlding. Their methods forefront the frictional and the abrasive as conduits for sensuality experienced at the underside of always fraught encounters with aesthetic and public cultures. 

 

Their practice is grounded in an understanding of queerness as a paradigm of historical disjuncture that demands we think about sex and gender embodiments in their enmeshment with larger systems of sense and sensation in the modern-colonial world. Each of their projects coalesces around an ongoing effort to deeply sense what it might look, sound, and feel like to forge forward with all that we consider intimate to us in a manner that embraces trace and ephemerality over the false comforts of a metaphysics of presence.
 

They hold an MFA in Art from the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan and an MA in Gender and Women's Studies from the American University in Cairo. They currently live and teach in Detroit.