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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