POUGHKEEPSIE, NY.- Simon Starling, a conceptual artist and winner of the Tate Gallery’s 2005 Turner Prize for Contemporary Art, will discuss his work in a lecture on Friday, October 30. Free and open to the public, the program will begin at 5:30pm in Taylor Hall (Room 203).

Starling is most famous for his installations, often made from wood, metal, and various flora and fauna. He is known for journeying with the installations he creates, which often give rise to questions about the relationship between nature and technology, between man’s mechanical creations and nature’s greater efficiency.

In 2004, in what became known as the “Tabernas Desert Run,” Starling improvised an electric bicycle on which he crossed Spain’s Tabernas desert. With the water waste created by the bicycle during the journey, Starling painted a watercolor of a cactus he saw along the way. In his 2005 work Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture No 2), Starling turned a wooden shed into a boat. He then loaded the leftover debris from the shed onto the boat before sailing down the Rhine. Upon arriving at a museum in Basel, he recreated the shed that the boat was constructed from.

In an interview with The Guardian, Starling answered questions about the importance of the backstory in his work, including if it was the backstory that gives his work meaning? Starling contended that one doesn’t need to know the backstory of conceptual art to appreciate it. “Some people will come to the work with a lot of knowledge, some not. That's true of any work of art. That's as true of a painting by Titian as it is of any conceptual work."

Simon Starling’s solo exhibitions have been seen around the world, from Glasgow to Barcelona to New York’s Guggenheim Museum. In 2003, he represented Scotland at the 50th Venice Biennial and, in 2004 he was short-listed for the Guggenheim's Hugo Boss Prize. Starling is a professor of fine arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, and currently lives in Copenhagen.