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
15
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online