Lynn Marie Kirby is an interdisciplinary artist who uses emerging technologies and site interventions to excavate and reveal the traces and effects of the past on the present. She makes works that create palimpsests of sites that draw upon her extensive project fieldwork. Each project begins with a deep personal/political resonance and requires a different set of research—including performative gatherings of histories, such as actively listening in the company of others, attention to architecture, revealing who has lived in neighborhood buildings, archival material, public records and oral history. For each project she develops a site related form through which to present the collected material to the public.
These thematic concerns manifest in the mining of ever changing technologies. She works in the fissures that occur between platforms to present the gaps in histories and narratives, drawing attention to the way we see through changing technology. Her background in cinema, performance, and sculpture, allows the work to rove between forms, from film to video to web-based platforms and handheld devices, from screen to installation. Recent projects often include poetic/associative experimental text, in take away broadsheets or books, that provide additional nuance to the work.