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
Cheshire Black #4
Here the artist’s hand emerges as the driving mechanism of the work’s significance. Even the prefabricated objects used in his multimedia installations are rendered with clear presence of the artist’s body. It is precisely this individualized mark-making that opens up meaning rather than closes it down- it creates a space for interpolation and interpretation rather than sealing the viewer off in the hermetic commitment to hyper-real slickness that so many contemporary makers use to seduce us.
Hanna Piper Burns
3.11.2012 |
