STARK CONTRAST. Eau Claire artist Larry Stark sits before some of the work he’s got hanging at the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library through Nov. 23.

Something Old and Something New is a photography-based show about culture in America as seen over decades by conceptual artist and printmaker Larry Stark. An important local artist, Stark has made interesting, intelligent, nationally recognized critical work while still managing to keep a keen sense of fun about it. Using common objects, he presents a portrait of America as seen from the inside, and whether documenting the long dark cheeseburger of the soul or the spam of our discontent, Stark is in it with his eyes open.

Stark began as a photographer in the late ’60s, tossing aside his degree
in mathematics to flee a life of accountancy and desk-jockeyism.

The exhibition at the L.E Phillips Memorial Public Library includes 28 pieces printed by the artist, either photo-serigraphs, or inkjet “digitaku” prints, as Stark likes to call them. There are prints here from almost the full span of his artistic career, over 40 years represented in total. The two huge photo-serigraphs (a screen-printed photographic print made with a technically demanding and potentially toxic process) hanging in the staircase offer a good summary of the feel of this show. On the left, a formal composition of the architectural import of a complex freeway interchange called “Monuments of the Western World #1,” and on the right, an (I assume) vastly enlarged view of the artist’s wife’s feet with the small gallery card next to it reading, “I Think My Wife’s Feet are Sexy.”    

Stark began as a photographer in the late ’60s, tossing aside his degree in mathematics to flee a life of accountancy and desk-jockeyism. He says, “I saw a show of Edward Weston and instantly I was a photographer.” Since then he has traveled a great deal across the country, making work both serious and mischievous about the cultural shifts and warts in America. For the series “One Culture Under God” he documented and ate McDonald’s for a month in 1970 (before it was even cool), back when the idea that you could drive 9,200 miles and only eat at one restaurant was astonishing. In 1976 he opened a checking account specifically to bounce checks through as art pieces in celebration of the country’s bicentennial.

These days his work is in the collections of top-shelf art museums across the country, and after years of art making, working as a commercial photographer, and a brief stint at asparagus farming, Stark finds himself back in an office, but still with culture to critique. About the “Spam Series,” six emails and a cover page, enlarged, framed and meant to be sold as a folio, he simply says, “I’m the office manager for my son’s company, so all the spam comes to my mailbox. I just thought that it was an important issue in our culture.” The prints, impersonal, large, worth money to some, none to others, threatening to some, a bore to others, seem just about right for spam.

The largest single set of work in this show is the collection of lottery tickets in the upstairs gallery. As cultural critique and as objects, these are quite poignant. They are simply enlarged photographic reproductions of lottery tickets from all over the country. Stark introduces them with gallery text about the rational odds of winning the lottery (as a good mathematician should) and being utterly schooled on the subject by a gas station attendant in Missouri who had both been hit by lightning and won the lottery. Hanging on the wall, the simple graphic design of them is raised to a shouting pitch by enlargement, all potential and no payoff since none (save one) have been scratched off. Stark says with a quick smile, “I never scratched them. I thought they would probably be more valuable as collectible objects than lottery tickets.” Probability-wise probably true, and while it’s also true that “you can only win if you play” (as the lottery ticket says), you can, as Stark has proved, also change the rules of the game you’re playing.

Something Old and Something New is on display at the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library in downtown Eau Claire through Nov. 23. For more information, visit ecpubliclibrary.info or call (715) 839-5004