Perry Burns, Blog, Artist

Perry Burns, Jali

Jali is a square painting in which a photograph of a group of Islamic women is nearly indiscernible due to the application of a black pixilated pattern such as one that might be found in a QR Code, the title refers to a term for a perforated stone or latticed screen common in Islamic architecture. The pattern obstructs an image of Pakistani women wearing burqas and thus reveals multiple layers of separation between the viewer (us) and the subjects of the painting (them).

Do you see what I see? 

The politics of seeing……

Politician II (part of the Heads of State series)

Perry Burns Art, Sara Nightingale Gallery, Water Mill, NY. June 30th-August 3rd. 

Opening reception Saturday June 30th from 6:00-8:00 pm

The series of my new work, titled ‘Heads of State,’ was inspired by the following poem by Octavio Paz -

The world stretches out before me,

the vast world of the big, the little, and the medium.

Universe of kings and presidents and jailors,

of mandarins and pariahs and liberators and liberated,

of judges and witnesses and the condemned:

stars of the first, second, third and nth magnitudes, planets, comets,

bodies errant and eccentric or routine

and domesticated by the laws of gravity,

the subtle laws of falling, all keeping step,

all turning slowly or rapidly around a void.

Where they claim the central sun lies,

the solar being, the hot beam made out of every human gaze,

there is nothing but a hole and less than a hole:

the eye of a dead fish, the giddy cavity of the eye that falls into itself

and looks at itself without seeing.

There is nothing with which to fill the hollow center of the whirlwind.

The springs are smashed, the foundations collapsed,

the visible or invisible bonds that joined one star to another,

one body to another, one man to another,

are nothing but a tangle of wires and thorns,

a jungle of claws and teeth that twist us

and chew us and spit us out and chew us again.

No one hangs himself by the rope of a physical law.

The equations falling endlessly into themselves,

I rise, fall, expand, contract forever. Forever.

My work is most fundamentally about the politics of seeing, and how the act of seeing affects, shapes, and informs our experience of the world both personally and publicly. The act of seeing is at once personal, public and political, and profoundly so at every level. —-Perry Burns, Artist. www.perryburns.net

Please join Perry Burns Art in an opening reception Saturday June 30th, 2012 from 6:00 to 8:00 pm at the Sara Nightingale Gallery.

A special thank you to NY Times writer Constance Rosenblum and NYC resident Nancy Sheppard for including me in this article. Nancy, thank you for supporting my art!

think-progress:

From @DemocracyNow, a massive pile of discarded tents and abandoned supplies left behind at Occupy Wall Street as police order protesters out.

The 99 Percent aren’t limited to one city or one state. Perhaps the state is a place within. Their heads, their hearts, their minds.

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign,
Blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind.
Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?

The sign says…..occupy.

Like a video game on pause, Perry Burns’s Over Kandahar, named after the Afghan city, captures a computerized battle. Helicopters fly directly toward the viewer, and from the smoke in the left-hand side, it’s clear that there is destruction ahead. Below the bright blue skies surrounding these bombers is a series of colored and grayscale streaks followed by op-art bulls-eyes. Burns challenges the complacency of playing a video game with the reality of the death and destruction of war.

nevver:

— Life Scoop

Perry Burns Art is pleased to announce the “Karma Icons Show” taking place at Arc Fine Art, LLC October 21st through November 23, 2011.

OPENING RECEPTION WILL BE Saturday October 29th, 2011 from 6pm-8:00 pm.

For more information, please visit http://arcfineartllc.com/ or contact Adrienne Ruger Conzelman, tel. 203-895-9595. Email: arc@arcfineartllc.com

While roaming the country and observing different places, I had the opportunity to capture the present version of America’s past. What do I mean by that? Here’s an example from Selma, AL.

Road Trip - Selma, Alabama - In 1965 became the heart of the civil rights movement after a small group of local citizens organized 600 people to march to Montgomery in protest of the current voting practices in the state. At the time the board of elections would open only 2 days a month, arrive late and take long lunch breaks in order to discourage blacks from registering to vote. Those 600 people were attacked with dogs, tear gas, beaten and driven back to Selma. Two weeks later Martin Luther King joined them and completed the march to Montgomery, by which time the number had grown to 25,000.

Each year now, there is an annual bridge crossing Jubilee which takes place the first weekend in March at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge and is attended by 30,000 people!  It is a street festival of music, art and history.  In addition, the Jubilee is the celebration and commemoration of the right to vote and March from Selma to Montgomery. It also serves as a reunion for many of the Voting and Civil Rights participants.

The politics of seeing….bridging the gap.

Where road signs and philosophy meet. I photographed this image because you are either covering it, laughing it off, kicking it, kissing it, busting it or trying to get a piece of it, you might as well put up a big sign about it!

www.facebook.com/perryburnsart

Artists Choose Artists will close on Sunday October 9th.

If you have not had a chance to attend the exhibit, please stop by the Parrish Art Museum before this Sunday. The address is 25 Jobs Lane, Southampton, NY 11968-5393

I was so honored to display my new work there, including this piece “Test Pattern Dictator.”

The road trip from East Hampton to Detroit to Chicago, Denver and San Francisco came to a pleasant pause in LA where I stopped to observe the Frank Gehry designed Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Perry Burns Art is now en route to Arizona.

ferrisartetcetera:

Frank Gehry- Disney Concert Hall

Photo from Occupy Wall Street that really stood out to me. There isn’t any police brutality, or a mass of people. The message is clear, the image is real, and so it continues……The Politics of Seeing.

bleudope:

They Reminisce Over You…

Perry Burns is on the road, looking to take in some new sights and sounds in the name of art. Denver and Los Angeles are among our destinations.

And in honor of road trips, we’ve posted this top list of NPR songs. What’s your road trip anthem? We’ll be sure to add it to our playlist.

Congrats to Mark Bradford, an artist I deeply admire. His show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago just finished this week.

amirahimage:

Scorched Earth, 2006
Mark Bradford

Billboard paper, photomechanical reproductions, acrylic gel medium, carbon paper, acrylic paint, bleach, and additional mixed media on canvas
Collection of Dennis and Debra Scholl

“We’re talking so much about war now, but it’ always about war in the Middle East. I was interested in the ways in which wars reshape territory and reshape land. I wanted to take an actual moment in history and then abstract it and pull it apart, and then put it back together again.”

The dramatic red and black color palette of Scorched Earth refers to the fiery end of the race riots that struck Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. Over the course of three days, rumor of an assault on a young white woman inflamed racial tensions and ended in the destruction of the Greenwood neighborhood, home to Tulsa’s black community. More than 30 city blocks were burned to the ground, leaving an estimated 300 African Americans dead and thousands more homeless.