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
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