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

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.

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.