A.K. BURNS
* mirrored glass 2019-ongoing
A series of hand-ladled glass, mirrored with silver nitrate and embedded with various materials and burnouts that disturb the ability of the mirror to reflect the outside world. Instead, they reflect an interior cosmos. The combination of disturbances and various orifices oscillate between being read as faces and punctuation.
Untitled (eclipse) 2019
single-channel 16mm film transfer to HD video, silent, color; 13 minutes
Untitled (eclipse) is a silent 16mm film shot in Nebraska during the total solar eclipse in 2017. The work was shot on film to capture this light-based phenomenon on a light reactive medium, as opposed to on digital video. Meditation on the metaphysical, in the work we observe the slow alignment of the moon eclipsing the sun, super-imposed onto the open landscape where it was shot. Wind, insects, and plants all become active receptors for this phenomenological shift from mid-day to mid-night, as the sun transforms from a primary source of life into a fugitive void.
: Leave No Trace (vinyl & poem) 2016
vinyl record, black nitrile gloves, silk-screened zip-lock bag, TRT 31:08 minutes, edition 300.
The work was displayed with a record player and the recording of the experimental audio work Leave No Trace. Viewers then chose to watch the work in silence or play the record as an asynchronous soundtrack.
ABOUT A.K. BURNS
A.K. Burns is an interdisciplinary artist and associate professor in the Department of Art at Hunter College, City University of New York.
Working at the nexus of language and materiality, Burns troubles systems that assign value and explores their socio-political embodiment.
Burns has exhibited internationally, including at the 2018 FRONT International: The Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art; the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf, Germany; MMK Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; New Museum, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, Oregon; and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio.
In 2008, Burns was a founding member of W.A.G.E (Working Artists in the Greater Economy)—a non-profit artists’ advocacy group. Community Action Center (2010) a video re-imagining pornographic cinema created in collaboration with A.L. Steiner, has screened internationally including the Tate Modern, London, UK and Museum of Modern Art, NY. Burns maintains a performance-centered collaborative practice with Katherine Hubbard, that includes The Poetry Parade…, presented at the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art, all in NY. Burns is a 2023 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow; a 2016 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award recipient.
2023 Tinworks Artist A.K. Burns. Photo by Chris Austin.