The works of Christopher Burch report from the interstices of identity and history, depicting bodies, acts and ideas within a process of co-emergence, slippage, and simultaneity. Burch’s aesthetic, fully realized as a resistant personal language, employs the abject and grotesque as accomplices: both hinge upon empathy as the locus of their power. Through drawing, sculpture, installation, and other desperate materials, Burch exposes the artifice inherent to the practice of self -definition through exteriority.
Surface is an illusion of protection-a false border
“Somethings…(are) In The Way of Things” (2012) San Francisco CA
documentation of Luggage Store’s Tenderloin National Forest A.I.R program
Somethings…(are) In the Way of Things was a full scale site specific installation that combined drawing, painting, flocked damask wallpaper, hand painted silver serving trays, and sculpture
Something in the Way of Things, written by Amiri Baraka in 2008, is a disturbingly subtle and dark social commentary probing an existential crisis within the African American experience due to the inability to fully synthesize historical and contemporary racial tensions and realities. Memory and testimony (ultimately language itself) become metaphors for seeing or the inability to see. Baraka exposes, that the borders between visibility (to see, to articulate ones experiences) and invisibility (to not see, to not be able to articulate ones experiences) are at times schizophrenic.
TNF A.I.R project entitled “Somethings ..are (In) the Way of Things”. During the months of January 2012 and February 2012, I, built a full scale, on site, installation/environment inspired by Amiris Baraka’s poem “Something in the Way of Things.”
for more information about the residency visit
http://www.luggagestoregallery.org/2012/01/christopher-burch-somethings-are-in-the-way-of-things/
http://artnowsf.com/wordpress/artist-spotlight-christopher-burch-the-luggage-store-residency-program-sf-ca/
2.28.2012 |
