This brochure with a curatorial essay by Emily Small was published in conjunction with the exhibition "A.K. Burns' Negative Space: Prepositions of the Future" which was one of two exhibitions presented in the MODA Curates series. MODA Curates is an annual opportunity offered by the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery and the MA in Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies Program (MODA) for outstanding curatorial proposals related to students’ theses.
Curated by Emily Small
A.K. BURNS’ NEGATIVE SPACE: PREPOSITIONS of t he FUTURE
MODA Curates is an annual opportunity offered by the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery and the MA in Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies Program (MODA) for outstanding curatorial proposals related to students’ theses.
This exhibition is made possible by an endowment established by Miriam and Ira D. Wallach.
Copyright © The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York
Texts © the authors
Images © the artist
A.K. Burns, Untitled (eclipse) , 2019, video still
Printed by Amerikom, NYC Typeset in Univers LT Std & Juana Design by Sophia Geronimus
Wallach Art Gallery Columbia University Lenfest Center for the Arts 615 West 129th Street New York, NY 10027 wallach.columbia.edu
A.K. BURNS’ NEGATIVE SPACE: PREPOSITIONS of t he FUTURE
Curated by Emily Small
Wallach Art Gallery
Foreword and Acknowledgments Betti-Sue Hertz Director and Chief Curator, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery
A.K. Burns’ Negative Space: Prepositions of the Future, curated by Emily Small, is presented as part of the tenth edition of MODA Curates. It continues a trajectory of M.A. student curatorial projects presented at the Wallach Art Gallery that offer audiences fresh perspectives on art steeped in contempo- rary cultural and theoretical discourses. The curators are often interested in artists who are defining new directions in art that simultaneously examines interiority and alternative imaginaries as well as the social and political pressures that shape new visualities. They often choose works that eschew the demands of given realities in search of more nuanced and complex figurations that do not rely on the possible. I am especially appreciative of the world making efforts of the 2022 MODA Curatorial Fellows at a time when we are grappling with the loss and isolation due to the Covid pandemic that has consumed us for the past two years. Art’s capacity to lift us up or take us to an elsewhere through a caring, visionary journey whose landscape is marked by, among other things, the postcolonial, a heightened climate awareness, and spectrums of gender, is a welcome intervention into the rou- tines of daily life. Small’s exhibition and curatorial essay provides a window into a multi- layered project of the contemporary artist A.K. Burns. The staging of several works from the artist’s Negative Space project is itself a compressed reshuffling of elements from earlier presentations including A Smeary Spot (NS0) and Leave No Trace (NS 000). Burns’ work, while questioning reality’s legitimacy through upending the signifiers of materiality, i.e., dirt and rock, also foregrounds the immateriality of spectral light. Yet the encounter with these elements of natural wonder warps under the pressure of the artist’s actions upon them as if to imply that the viewer’s gaze itself has the power to convert the encounter with the natural “other” into a speculative world of otherness. While tethered to assumed realities, the process of inversion is purposely at play here, a queering that is both deliberate, necessary and subtle enough to elide its own naming. In the nineteenth century, sexual inversion was believed to be an inborn reversal of gender traits, “a woman’s soul confined within a man’s body.” In contemporary times, the further disintegration of gender binaries has become a way of seeing as well as a way of being. It is in this seeing that realities become heightened with torqued possibilities, not only in the realm of human sexual expression but in the desire to be propelled into other spheres and states that take us on a journey
outside of normal perceptions. Small in collaboration with the artist, employs sampling to shape this pursuit differently through the relational connections between the artworks themselves. For her work on Burns’ metaphysical exploration of the natural world in the age of the Anthropocene, Small finds the fissures that conjoin Burns’ aesthetic conjectures with the science fiction of the present. Negative space is an opening to a spiritual quest that eludes language—a quest to grasp a state of becoming. A.K. Burns implicitly considers a range of applications of the term “negative space.” As Small restates, this term refers to the space around an object. It has come to represent absence, what the object is not. The significance of this so-called negative or void is that it puts pressure on that which is deemed the object, that is, presence itself. Yet, this binary is itself a misnomer. Timothy Morton, the speculative realism philosopher dissolves the binary with his identification of hyperobjects—that is, all kind of temporal and spatial dimensions, as a refute of traditional ideas about what can be an object. In other realms negative space, let’s say, the black hole’s gravitational force, was long misunderstood as without substance, while in reality it pulls stuff in. This and other outer space phenomena make spaces for the rule breaking alternative and fantastic worlds associated with science fiction. The annual MODA Curates series offered by the Wallach Art Gallery and the M.A. program in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies (MODA), recognizes outstanding curatorial proposals from students related to their theses. MODA Curatorial Fellows benefit from their experiences at the Gallery early in their careers. My hope is that those experiences form a solid foundation for future endeavors. The pedagogical process of marshaling the student’s talents and ambitions to support the development of their curatorial ideas is emergent from the mentorship of the MODA program to the Wallach Art Gallery’s active role in shepherding the exhibition through the curatorial process. Our colleague Janet Kraynak, director of the MODA program in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, partners with the Gallery to advise the MODA Curatorial Fellows, providing valued scholarly leadership and collegial collaboration. She is also Smalls’ advisor and a reader for the essay included in this publication. We extend our thanks to Jack Halberstam, director for Columbia University’s Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality who has generously agreed to participate in the exhibition’s public programming. Generous support for Small’s exhi- bition project was received from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for which we are grateful. Finally, we congratulate Emily for putting together such an innovative and provocative exhibition, and the artist, A.K. Burns for sharing her work with our visitors.
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Introduction Janet Kraynak
Director, MA in Modern and Contemporary Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies, Department of Art History and Archaeology
I am pleased to introduce the 2022 installment of MODA Curates, which takes place each year in the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery in the Lenfest Center for the Arts at Columbia University. MODA Curates plays a key role in the program’s pedagogical approach, providing young scholars and curators with unparalleled opportunities that prepare them for a professional world or future post-graduate study. After a competitive review process, where individual exhibition proposals are assessed for their original approach and relevance to the field, selected students are named as MODA Curatorial Fellows and given the opportunity to mount a professional exhibition, often related to their theses, in a gallery setting. This year, the two MODA Curatorial Fellows––Kojo Abudu and Emily Small––have created timely exhibitions, one thematic and one monographic, which individually examine important developments in contemporary art from the vantage point of differing theoretical and geographical contexts. In close conjunction with the Wallach staff and its Director, Betti-Sue Hertz, the students worked over the course of the academic year on all aspects of the exhibition’s execution: fromorganizing loans to developing installation strategies to preparing their individual catalogue essays. Emily Small’s exhibition, A.K. Burns’ Negative Space: Prepositions of the Future , focuses upon artist A.K. Burns’ multi-year and multi-faceted project, Negative Space . Comprised of photographic, filmic, sculptural and sonic elements, the work draws upon the genre of science-fiction (both in literary and visual terms) to probe the ongoing and accelerating ecological crisis confronting the globe. With precedence in the earthworks and site/non-site installations of artist Robert Smithson from the 1960s–70s, which presciently registered the impacts of capitalism and industrialism upon the land, to the mournful sculptural “stacks” of the 1990s by the late artist Felix Gonzalez- Torres, which rendered the semiotics of loss from the AIDS crisis through acts of sculptural depletion, Burns’ epic looks the past and present of con- temporary culture, probing issues of difference, belonging, and exclusion
through imagery and material form. We see land before and after the disasters of human intervention––under the sign of progress––in the series, before the wake (2015), in which Burns scrawls upon found photographs documenting the site before the building of Lake Powell in the Utah Desert; and the misleading beauty of a solar eclipse in the film Untitled (eclipse) (2019) , which Burns counters with a disconnected soundtrack. As Small notes in her catalogue essay, the project’s eponymous “negative space” stands as both a reference to the chasms of the American Dream––of those left out, of those who do not fit its narrow definition––while operating as a path of resistance, “a site of infinite potentialities which could emerge from the realm of nothingness” [italics in original]. As Small concludes, “from a subordinate position, agency may be found.” Thematically and structurally, the speculative possibilities of science fiction thus strategically operate in Burns’ invented world: as the artist’s works encourage the imagining of an alternative place in the present, one of endless possibility. As such, the exhibition seeks to grant a degree of agency to the beholder, who not only views the works in question, but navigates themwith improvisa- tional acts, generating their own moments of intrusion: their own filling of negative space. On behalf of the MODA Program and the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, I congratulate Emily Small for this thought-provoking exhibition, and extend thanks to A.K. Burns, and the entire staff of the Wallach Art Gallery, for their collaborative efforts.
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A.K. BURNS’ NEGATIVE SPACE: PREPOSITIONS of t he FUTURE
Emily Small
The void is a lively tension, a desiring orientation toward being/becoming. The vacuum is flush with yearning, bursting with innumerable imaginings of what could be. The quiet cacophony of different frequencies, pitches, tempos, melodies, noises, pentatonic scales, cries, blasts, sirens, sighs, syncopations, quarter tones, allegros, ragas, bebops, hiphops, whimpers, whines, screams, are threaded through the silence, ready to erupt, but simultaneously crosscut by a disruption, dissipating, dispersing the would-be sound into non/being, an indeterminate symphony of voices. The blank page teeming with the desires of wouldbe traces of every symbol, equation, word, book, library, punctuation mark, vowel, diagram, scribble, inscription, graphic, letter, inkblot, as they yearn toward expression. A jubilation of empti-ness. Don’t for a minute think that there are no material effects of yearning and imagining. —Karen Barad, What Is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice In the shadow of a global pandemic, why examine alternative modes of perception? How do we speak about another world without questioning its validity for study, given the ongoing struggles to preserve this current one on the edge of climate collapse brought on by settler colonialism, disaster capitalism, extractive mining, and the greater neoliberal capital system, which continues again and again to privilege a toxic nationalist impulse? Is it relevant to reflect on these anxieties when countless events from recent years have proven that climate is not simply eco-, but socio-eco-political, non-temporal but ever-present, in a web of improvised world-building which takes place within alternative modernities to western utopianism? A.K. Burns is an American contemporary artist who explores these questions through articulations of land and body as sites and spaces of political tension and radical possibility. A.K. Burns’ Negative Space: Prepositions of the Future arranges a selection of works from the artist’s allegorical science-fiction epic Negative Space. Rather than using a set of signs subscribed to by this world, that fall repeatedly into hierarchical patterns which reinforce the crisis we are currently living through, Burns reinvents strategies of representation through a “speculative present”—a narrative device for imagining an uncanny world that could be happening in the now. In this exhibition, representations of the Earth are articulated in varying, unconventional ways from sampling methods of analytic study, to mimicking corporeal forms. Rather than direct representation, these works are pre- positions on thinking about climate within time, space, and identity, to expand
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1 Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (Verso Books, 2007), 255. 2 Benjamin Robertson, “‘Some Matching Strangeness’: Biology, Politics, and the Embrace of History in Octavia Butler’s ‘Kindred,’” Science Fiction Studies 37, no. 3 (2010): 362–81. 3 Terry Smith, “From Multiple Modernisms to Global Contemporaneity: Where, When, How, Why and in Whose Interest?,” Multiple Modernisms (symposium), November 2, 2017. Louisiana Research, Louisiana Museum of Art, Copenhagen, video recording, https://vimeo.com/248311272. Rather than supporting evidence towards a relativist means of thinking, SF is a powerful framing device that allows greater public access to various methods of living that have emerged over time across different modernities, and continues to ensure futures for those who can envision it. Prolific writers in this space such as Octavia Butler or Ursula K. LeGuinn for example, —the latter a strong influence on Burns’ project—have historically used SF as political parable and allegory. This practice bridges real-world issues such as racism or oppressive gender binaries with radical ways of re-imagining freer and fairer means of existence that have in turn been taken up by their readers to enact real political change. 2 In this way, SF as a genre is prepositional to the world we live in today. In English grammar, a preposition expresses a spatial or temporal relation to another word that denotes a semantic role—to be prepositional then is to be in an active community with sign systems. a vocabulary of representation. Within the scientific method, there is always a remainder of knowledge—a free radical of possibility—which emerges. This tenant is central to the strategies used by science fiction writers throughout history, where allegory challenges notions of self and other through experimenting with our own realities. Emerging from this set of coordinates, Burns’ work gives matter to unseen/unforeseen spaces which can expand our collective language around what determines a world. Central to the genre of SF is its use of expanded sites of knowledge pro- duction—prologues, epilogues, maps, languages, new genders, new species, new labor systems, and new existential problems—to construct a believable and inhabitable space for the reader. Theorist and critic Fredric Jameson has written in Archeologies for the Future that the “supreme function” of SF is its ability to conjure “a shocked renewal of our vision such that once again, and as though for the first time, we are able to perceive their historicity and their arbitrariness, their profound dependency on the accidents of man’s historical adventure.” 1 His emphasis on how SF puts time and knowledge into new perspectives, recognizes a way to think around the signs which construct our current systems of being and becoming. By de-centering hegemonic logics that are informed and shaped by self-replicating systems of crisis, the argument is that one could reimagine both history and authority itself, allowing some worlds to end while others continue into new realms of possibility.
Historian Terry Smith has proposed that a world is a mix of intimate settings and far-off powers, and that existential meanings are embedded in everyday routines that oscillate around supraspecific logics (neoliberalism, globalism, nationalism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam for example). 3 In this framing, the emphasis is removed from the individual subject itself, and dispersed to the space that is created through connection between interacting subjects or objects that bypass a hierarchy of control and form an entangled relationship to each other. This is an entanglement that has had impact throughout the history of the United States. With observations that the European conquest of the Americas in 1492 coincides with a notable marked drop in atmos- pheric carbon, historian T. J. Demos writes, “The new geological epoch… represents the genocidal ending of an earlier one, with the Anthropocene’s origins being inextricable from early modern globalization, practiced through resource extraction, military conquest, and culture-erasing colonialism. One can rightly argue that the world’s currently threatened end—that of catastro- phic climate breakdown—has been rehearsed many times before, prepared through the long unfolding of capitalism’s five-hundred-year-old history.” 4 Increasingly, as Demos highlights, cross-medium historians and scientists agree that the impending collapse is a superstructure, living in an interchange of the multiple worlds various spheres of society already occupy. Theorist Jack Halberstam refers to these oscillating phenomena as “paradigm of collapse,” meaning that as a western society we are not only seeing the hyphenation of fields coalesce but that we are mixed into that coalescence as a state of long extended emergency. 5 Contemporary exhibitions from recent years centering SF and spanning varying mediums have evidenced a rising interest in this topic, however Burns’ work remains unique from these exhibitions in its insistence upon the potential of its own reality. 6 It falls in historic lineage with contemporary artists who activate phenomenology to tap into an art of interaction. Presented in both immersive and interactive installations, a visitor performs systems of alternative perspectives as they learn about the works through inhabiting physical space and methods of discovery. 4 T. J. Demos, Beyond the World’s End: Arts of Living at the Crossing , (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 9. 5 Jack Halberstam, “An Aesthetics of Collapse” (lecture), October 20, 2021, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska – Lincoln, video recording, https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Wf6Xw6bHAfs. 6 A few of which include the film series Future Imperfect (2017) organized by Joshua Siegel, Born in Flames: Feminist Futures (2021) curated by Jasmine Wahi, the 48-hour forum Afrofuturism + Beyond directed by Louise Martorano, Indigenous Futurisms: Transcending Past/Present/Future (2020) curated by Suzanne Fricke, Chelsea Herr (Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma), and ManuelaWell-Off-Man, and Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas (2017) curated by Robb Hernández,Tyler Stallings, and Joanna Szupinska-Myers.
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A.K. Burns, Untitled (grain) , 2012 (detail)
The Works
The dam and the desert play significant roles for Burns as emblems of mankind’s ongoing attempt to dominate an inhospitable and insubordinate habitat. The landscape, mythologized within American history through a lens of Manifest Destiny, is alien and bleak for human dwelling, and becomes a protagonist in and of itself. In before the wake (2015) a series of interventions made by Burns explore the site-specific research conducted for filming the first video of the project A Smeary Spot (NS0) (2015) . Each of the twelve prints comprising the work, six of which are presented in the exhibition, is built on an image torn out of a catalog of photographs taken by Tad Nichols documenting the Glen Canyon before it was dammed and turned into Lake Powell in the Utah Desert. Upon the surface of these images Burns has splashed and painted a mixture of spirulina and polyurethane to dam the images herself. These images, with their green stains of experimentation and uncanny terrain, recall science fiction imagery and freeze the canyons in impacted time. 7 In their 2011 publication Cruel Optimism , theorist Lauren Berlant argues that national identity is less linked to choices we make than to a set of compulsory attachments and identifications that are known through feeling. 8 The persistence of the American Dream, or the long extended state of its decom- position, is attributed, they suggest, to cruel optimism, which is a devotional conditioning under nationhood, a desiring something that is self-detrimental which has higher stakes in an interchange of fantasy and futility. 9 This they say, is something processed through experience before rationalized in thought. That history in the present is understood first through affect, Berlant says, is the body’s response to the world, something you’re always catching up to. This anxiety of perpetual deference is also the grasping for the unattainable, and a demand upon the now. In many ways, Berlant’s affective theory is the fraudulent promise of the American Dream and its proposal of the good life which, always just out of reach, is tricking even those supposedly included in the prospect into feeling the defunct and isolating promises of individualism 7 While driving through the desert on a cross country trip in 2015, Burns was struck by the vast open space of such a familiar/unfamiliar landscape. While filming there, the artist discovered Lake Powell, and understood its uncanny presence without fully comprehending why. Later learning about the various interventions within the desert, Burns discovered that the lake was constructed via a dam that was built in 1956. Burns also discovered that the site is held in public government lands, which means in theory, its ownership is shared by all Americans. Through invisible borders, these lands are meant to be accessible to the public, and managed by the government held in the trust for all those living in the United States. 8 Lauren Gail Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011): 2. 9 Ibid., 1. 10 José Esteban Muñoz, “Queerness as Horizon,” in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Sexual Cultures (New York: New York University Press, 2009): 20–22.
and manifest destiny. Theorist José Estabon Muñoz proposed in Cruising Utopia , referencing philosopher Edmund Husserl who coined phenome- nology as the body’s invitation to “look to horizons of being”, that imaging what might not be here—imaging in perpetual deference—may be a means to usher in a more free and fluid “belonging-in-difference.” 10 Through intervention, agency is returned to Burns in before the wake through the
A.K. Burns, six works from the series before the wake , 2014
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A.K. Burns, Untitled (eclipse) , 2019, video stills
desert’s reconfiguration, abbreviating the planetary human impact upon the resource of water with a horizon of being. Through these scientific-like framed reproductions an eerie sense of impending infliction and possibility is presented: that which has happened now, but was at one point yet to come. If subjects of the American Dream are stuck in Berlant’s cruel optimism, then those who are peripheral to it, forgotten to history, filling the negative space of the picture plane with context, may have a chance at surviving past its toxicity. These are not observations on those within the void, but on the void itself, its melancholic haze of imprisoned power. As Burns has said, when you have nothing, you have the potential for all kinds of opportunities. 11 Negative Space is a state of endless beginning, of endless potentiality. This work reformats our perception of a narrative which separates characters through predetermined sign systems, to explore what could happen if the void could speak and move for itself. Untitled (eclipse) (2019) , is a 16mm film of a total solar eclipse shot in Nebraska in 2017. During 13 minutes of silent change insects and plants are foregrounded to equalize the varying components of landscape in scale to the human body. Following the before the wake series a viewer might imagine a sort of objective utopian ecosystem within the film, however a record player on the other side of the wall, set to play the soundtrack to Negative Space, Leave No Trace (NS000) (2016) , course-corrects this fantasy to remind
A.K. Burns, Leave No Trace (vinyl & poem) , 2016. Installation photo: Sean Fader
11 “A.K. Burns: Artist’s Talk,” July 20,2016. Pacific Northwest College of Art, live video recording, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWNZfhKW-X4. 12 Here, again I reference José Esteban Muñoz as he cites philosopher Giorgio Agamben and his term “potentiality” to argues similarly, that otherness is a state of being in queerness which is a belonging that feels “not quite here”. “Potentiality” then picks up on a state of being that is both in the present and represented in the distance, somewhere other. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 21. viewers that things are never just as they appear. The record is available for visitors to turn on at their sporadic choosing outside the wall. With speakers for this track inside the video room to compliment Untitled (e clipse), participation in the event becomes intervention—forming a permutation of spontaneous experiences between sound and sight, and sound and site, inside and outside the viewing room. A source of amorphic intrusion just one wall away, the negative space within the work becomes the work itself as the unseen visitor turns on and off a soundtrack. Many of Burns’ pieces like Untitled (eclipse) provide analytic clues for a viewer to find this affective void and become theatrical proposals where they play out a speculative reality which has the potential to circumvent Berlant’s compulsions. The viewer therefore becomes a preposition them-selves through interventions within the gallery, ultimately deepening their conceptions of otherness. In this work, negative space is restive, rapidly changing from something perplexing to something that forms new meaning and discovery. For Burns, “negative space” is directly linked to a state of otherness, communities excluded from hegemonic self-replicating systems. It is therefore representative of a site of infinite potentialities which could emerge from the realm of nothingness; from a subordinate position, agency may be found . 12
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Corporeal Soil (2017) , a series of three bags of dirt strewn throughout the space, act as a new type of mapping within this exhibition. Hidden within these torso-shaped sculptures are wrappers referencing the candies of untitled works by the artist Félix González-Torres. Starting in the 1990’s González-Torres created a series of works in memoriam to those battling HIV and AIDS. The pieces consist of piles of candies wrapped in multicolored plastic stacked in a corner of a museum for visitors to take and consume at their choosing. The piles are maintained by the gallery or institution at a weight equal to that of the weight of various bodies during their affliction. His partner, Ross Laycock, was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988 and was the center of one of the most well-known of these series, Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991) . The candy pile in this work is maintained at 175 pounds, that of Ross’s own body weight. Working through time, grief, and consumption, this work troubles who in society is deemed disposable. In the exhibition at the Wallach Art Gallery, three works titled Corporeal Soil spill dirt onto gallery floors, detritus of Earth and body muddy the ground. The space isn’t clean, it is imbued with the stains of histories, the losses of lovers who would fail to make it into the canonical books of time. In addition, these bags evoke sand-bags used to weigh down tarps at construction sites or tie down a scrim curtain backstage in a theater. They metaphorically keep something in place—the labor of each bag, although invisible, is present. They are cartographers of loss in process, their presence become stains of how to read space. A.K. Burns’ Negative Space (NS) project generates new materiality through an SF ready-made system that itself is performative of these theories through inviting viewers to inhabit not only the space itself but the array of world- shaping perspectives that manifest that space. Foremost, it is a re-evaluation of the signs we use to represent and embody the world, and how those signs are embedded in hierarchies which lead us towards catastrophe. This can be seen as a semiological development as predicted by Roland Barthes in Elements of Semiology. He writes, “...that language is the domain of articulations, and the meaning is above all a cutting-out of shapes. It follows that the future task of semiology is far less to establish lexicons of objects than to rediscover the articulations which men impose on reality; looking into the distant and perhaps ideal future, we might say that semiology and taxonomy, although they are not yet born, are perhaps meant to be merged into a new science, arthrology, namely the science of appointment.” 13 This exhibition puts arthrology into practice by making a viewer perform the very joints of logic that SF theorizes. As co-curator of Mundos Alternos Joanna Szupinska identified, these intersections are themselves the leaking disruptions of impositions on reality. She writes, “A core strategy to specu-
A.K. Burns, Corporeal Soil, 2017
A.K. Burns, Corporeal Soil, 2017
13 Roland Barthes, Annette Lavers, and Colin Smith, Elements of Semiology (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 57. 14 Joanna Szupinska, “Máquinas Solteras: On the Bachelor Machine in Latino and Latin American Art,” in Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas (Riverside, California: UCR ARTSblock, 2017): 65. lative fiction is the bringing together of contradictory realities…The result is a slippage between self and other, male and female, ego and superego, robotic and organic, and science and faith.” 14 In Burns’ work, notions of representation, (political, environmental, and personal) are troubled through experimental and experiential processes which reveal the entanglement of existence. Artwork like Burns’ presents new temporal and spatial representa- tions through speculative encounters which articulate how hegemonic and supremic powers such as the American Dream are contemporarily tied to both existential issues such as climate collapse, and intrapersonal issues such as the articulation of identity and belonging. As Burns has said, binaries are not inherently wrong, however the power imbalances which govern through them require disruption if we are to navigate into a world of desire, celebration, freedom, and justice.
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About the Artist A.K. Burns is an American contemporary artist and educator who explores the intersections of land, body, and time. A non-gender-conforming artist, Burns’ early career centered community through exploring gender and sexual identity in collaborative projects such as Community Action Center (2010), a video pornography with A. L. Steiner. With this inclination towards community, Burns took trans-feminist issues to other stages including various museum institutions (The Whitney, MoMA, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art) with the performance intervention The Poetry Parade… (2014) , and publishing with the project RANDY (2010 –13). In 2008, Burns also co-founded W.A.G.E. (Working Artists in the Greater Economy), a non-profit arts advocacy group which remains in operation, advocating for fair labor contracts between artists and institutions and sustainable, self-regulatory, and equitable fund distribution in the arts. Burns has also developed a rich repertoire of sculp- ture which often nods to notions of the ready-made in an appropriation of post-minimal impulses. It can be said that the core to all of Burns’ projects is the insistence that issues of politics and identity are not separated out into varying categories but rather stream into and affect all facets of existence.
Emily Small is an American scholar and emerging curator from Northern California whose interests focus on queer and feminist methodologies in contemporary craft, performance, and video. She received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018 where she studied the historical intersections between performance art, textiles, and social activism.
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A.K. Burns: Works in the Exhibition Dimensions are listed height before width before depth
Night Shift, 2022 Cement-hydrocal mix, steel rebar, steel remesh, nylon cord, titanium lure leader, speed bag, powder coating 81 x 41 x 19 in. Untitled (eclipse), 2019 Single-channel 16mm film transferred to HD video, color, silent 13 min. Corporeal Soil, 2017 Topping soil, foil-wrapped hard candy, epoxy resin 15 x 15 x 8 in. Corporeal Soil, 2017 Topping soil, foil-wrapped hard candy, epoxy resin 10 x 17 x 14 in. Corporeal Soil, 2017 Topping soil, foil-wrapped hard candy, epoxy resin 17 x 18 x 7 in.
before the wake, 2014 Six works from a series of twenty-one Spirulina and polyurethane on pages
from Glen Canyon: Images of a Lost World by Tad Nichols Each 10 1/2 x 9 in.
Untitled (grain), 2012 Digital c-Print from 35mm film 30 x 44 in.
Untitled (grain), 2012 Digital c-print from 35mm film 30 x 44 in. Untitled (grain), 2012 Digital c-print from 35mm film 44 x 30 in.
All works courtesy the artist
Leave No Trace (vinyl & poem), 2016 Vinyl record, black nitrile gloves, silkscreened zip-lock bag
31 min. 8 sec. Edition of 300
Produced with support from Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR
A.K. BURNS’ NEGATIVE SPACE: PREPOSITIONS of t he FUTURE
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