Dan Starling is currently interested in the generative possibilities for art making offered by the mediums of printmaking, drawing, and artist books. In previous projects he has also used photography, video and performance. As a settler inhabiting the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, his work attends to how strategies of repetition, sequence, and layering of images and texts can generate new ideas that challenge the myths necessary to maintaining the status quo; How art can create friction to rupture and de-stabilize normative narratives; How art can leap into the past to re-situate present cultural, social, and political configurations; How art’s speculative fictions open the door to an equitable future.

For example, he has re-written and re-illustrated the children’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory based on the repression of racism therein; inserted a chorus into Star Wars to discuss the discontent with democracy; re-made Chris Marker’s film Sans Soleil to address cultural amnesia. Most recently, his print series Unsettled Histories expands the narrative potential of the Rembrandt’s The Three Crosses (1653) and aligns it with the contemporary concerns of decolonization and climate change.

Starling holds a Meistershuler from the Städelschule, Frankfurt and has previously taught at Emily Carr University and NSCAD University. He has presented solo exhibitions at the Burnaby Art Gallery (2022), the Klondike Institute of Art & Culture (2021), Wil Aballe Art Projects & VIVO Media Arts Centre (2018) and Malaspina Printmakers (2013). His work has appeared in numerous group exhibitions, notably at Kunsthall Oslo, Kunstverein Frankfurt, M HKA Antwerp, Confederation Centre PEI and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Contemporary and traditional approaches to print media