“Most people were looking through their phones,” says Mia Štark, having spent part of the afternoon observing how visitors to Barcelona’s Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, where her work-stay with mentor Ana Prvački takes place, responded to the pivotal piece of modernist architecture. She makes this observation without judgement, at the same time reflecting on technology’s role in shaping and mediating our ways of seeing. The artist has, after all, witnessed this before; it was watching her grandmother—in spring and summer a “super connected person,” retreat to her living-room to take in the world via her TV come wintertime—that provided the springboard for Štark’s An Anthology of Glances: at once a comment on, and a gentle guide to, maximizing the way we see.
Though her project stemmed from her grandmother’s reliance on TV news, Štark’s exploration of visual consumption extends far beyond questions of media diet. Her grandmother, typically an engaged observer out in nature, would passively collapse in front of this new technology. But it is her active, or as Štark describes it “old-fashioned way of looking” while outdoors, that forms the backbone of An Anthology of Glances. What does this entail? “It’s this moment of being grounded and simultaneously navigating your movements through patterns of perception,” she expounds, something that the artist recognizes and admires in the paintings of David Hockney and Croatian abstract painter Julije Knifer. He is known for his “meander” visual motif, which is endlessly repeated in his work to create a kind of monotonous rhythm bordering on the absurd. “I feel like painters are the ones who really know how to look,” Štark adds.
Indeed, grounding and motion are not mutually exclusive; for Štark, they go together, even in the seemingly static medium of painting. “What I see in the works of both Knifer and Hockney is movement,” she comments. But it is perhaps dance, in which she completed her initial training, that best demonstrates the marriage of movement and grounded awareness: “You simultaneously need to think about where your head is, where your arm is, where your feet are. Are you going to hit somebody or is somebody going to hit you?” Computing the myriad visual stimuli is just one piece of the puzzle, however. “There is a scene happening around you and all this visual information to take in, but also sound and the sensation on your skin—a tactility,” she notes.