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.
NY Times: Lower Manhattan/Habitats "A Bold Look Of Confiendece" -
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!
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.
Top 10 Tumblr Blogs to Creatively Inspire You -
— Life Scoop