#sandra burns

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Elizabeth Thornton (Erin Krakow) Pink party gown.. When Calls The Heart (2014-).. Costume by Sandra Burns.

[lovegracieallenburns]

The Burns Family - within a ten year difference  

[lovegracieallenburns]

The Burns Family.

[tigerstrikesasteroid]

Habitat Fracture - Essay

Domestic is a sticky term often thrown around when discussing works remotely connected to the home.  Domesticity refers to the affairs of the home, which may be the most interesting and loaded product of human existence. With Tiger Strikes Asteroid’s Habitat Fracture, Sandra Burns and Chrissy Day investigate the relationships between personal experience and mythology and physical space through meticulously crafted imagery and sculpture dissecting the residential environments of the past and present while bringing it safely out of the realm of the inaccessibly personal. That environment just happens to be house and home. 

These works by Burns and Day create new interior spaces, while strongly referencing what Day refers to as the “domestic sphere.”  The pieces in Habitat Fracture subvert nostalgia and allude to something else, something more.  Though both artists reference individual experience, that experience is elevated through the deconstructions and reconstruction of the familiar.  For Day the constructed relationships amongst corners, edges and intersections in these interior spaces are revealed through photographic study before she commits them to model and ultimately sculpture.  Unsettling thicknesses of moldings, odd gaps where hinge meets frame and familiar outlines literally turned on their heads – through these elements Day brings us beyond the house and home.  And Burns seems like she aims to burn it all down.  In one image an aggressively purple area rug hides a secret and in another a child flies into frame, a scene of ancient wallpaper littered with tourism and religious iconography.  And in one of the most provocative photographs in the series, that same wallpaper is set ablaze.  Where Day breaks a specific house into splintered and skewed products of blue prints, Burns uses performance within similar interior spaces to stir up and challenge the banality of “home”.

Upon first glance, Day’s sculptures might give the impression of prefabrication. But this series, made from found objects and more often those she crafts from scratch, is deceivingly deliberate.  By choosing these commonplace subjects – a door, a banister, a maze of molding – Day nearly severs the personal memory of that space from its subject, leaving us with an altered, maybe even a little alien, yet very familiar object. And this object retains a new meaning, less restricted by its source memory but never completely losing ties with the original space.  The sense of place still remains.

Through an ingenious method of transferring photographic image to reflective metal surfaces, Day recalls the birth of photography with her “Mirrors” series while utilizing a contemporary industrial application.  Disguised as precious yet abandoned objects, these reflective knick-knacks are in invitation for daydreams as well a surprising view into one’s own face.  Viewing these interior objects adorned with exterior images are like staring out of a favorite window, and yet the texture of the object remains illustrating the clash between longing and recording the memory of desire. 

Where memory clashes with what Burns calls the “catechization of one’s past” we find interiors clearly at odds with the objects and people that inhabit them. A woman wearing a powder blue suit sans jacket seems to hover in midair, her hand anticipating the inevitable crash with a white-sheeted mattress, her foot dangerously close to colliding with a stack of ominous cinderblocks.  In another the same woman, fully suited, simply hangs in the center of the frame, pensive and relaxed.  Burns doesn’t hide her methods of photographic exploration during these particular scenes, she presents them in a way that calls into question, even into the realm of doubt as to what exactly we are seeing. In what Burns calls this “fractious space” an unsettling exploration of the banality of the domestic takes place.  Action rails against symbols of the home and collides with the memories of family. 

One clearly static and one explosively kinetic, Day and Burns still thrive comfortably under one roof.  Habitat Fracture is an exploration of internal and external spaces through the reconciliation and even depository of personal memory.  These spaces transcend what they originally meant to both artists, creating at once a reflection and an aberration of a place called home.

--  Megan Carr is an artist/curator living in Philadelphia. She is the author of the arts and entertainment blog therestiscreamcheese.com and a correspondent for The Main Line Times. 

[tigerstrikesasteroid]

Habitat Fracture: Sandra Burns & Chrissy Day

Habitat Fracture: Sandra Burns and Christina Day December 4 - 25, 2009  Opening reception: Friday, December 4th, 6 – 10pm

[MORE IMAGES] [ESSAY BY MEGAN CARR]

PHILADELPHIA – Tiger Strikes Asteroid is pleased to announce the opening of its December two-person exhibition, Habitat Fracture: Sandra Clark Burns and Christina Day. 

From the essay by Megan Carr: “These works by Burns and Day create new interior spaces, while strongly referencing what Day refers to as the ‘domestic sphere.’  The pieces in Habitat Fracture subvert nostalgia and allude to something else, something more.  Though both artists reference individual experience, that experience is elevated through the deconstructions and reconstruction of the familiar.”

Sandra Clark Burns is an artist currently living and working in New Haven, CT.  She holds an MFA from Yale and her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, including a solo exhibition at The Northampton Center for the Arts (Northampton, MA), and group shows at Jenny Jaskey Gallery (Philadelphia, PA), Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), and the Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts.  

Christina Day is a Philadelphia-based artist and holds an MFA from Cranbrook.  Her work was recently exhibited at the Belskie Museum of Art and Science (Closter, NJ), Edward Hopper House Art Center (Nyack, NJ), and Marlboro Gallery (Largo, MD).

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Two cute copycats are Ronnie and Sandra--the younger members of the Burns and Allen family, and two important reasons why George and Gracie are a pair of homebodies.

Photoplay - April, 1938