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
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