PARIS.- A.K. Burns (b. 1975) is Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist who views the body as a contentious domain wherein issues of gender, labor, ecology and sexuality are negotiated. Working to agitate these systems of value, Burns utilizes video, installation, sculpture, drawing and collaboration.
Burns is currently working on Negative Space (2012-onging), a cycle of multi-media works that draw on theater, philosophy, quantum theory and ecological fragility. Conjuring and deconstructing science fiction tropes, Negative Space builds each episode around physical systems: sun, void, land, water, and body. The opening episode, A Smeary Spot , is a 4-channel 53 minute video installation that debut in 2015 at Participant Inc., NY. The installation that explores the ‘sun’ as a manifestation of power, a source of both life and death and around which the other episodes circulate. The following episode, Living Room was shown at the New Museum in NY, in 2017. It is a 36-minute, two-channel video installation explores the ‘body’, both as a site of exploitation and agency.
It is through leaks, folds, levity, multiple meanings and partial becomings that Burns exorcises the space between materiality and language. Her choices of materials and medium, while diverse are never arbitrary, rather, each work holds meaning through the contents of its making. Burns maintains a prolific practice that includes works like: Leave No Trace (2016), an experimental audio project recorded on vinyl that is packaged in a zip-bag with a pair of nitrile gloves and a poem; Post Times (2017), a series of drawings made from layers of the New York Times and The New York Post ; and Corporeal Soil (2017), a series of torso-like, slumped bags cast from dirt. The process of coming to matter is always in relief against that which does not matter—excess, waste and subordinated bodies. It is this rich affective space of non-mattering which Burns often explores; for example, in works such as Discard (work shirt) (2013) a series of wall hung mono-print reliefs cast in aluminum of Burns’ discarded, sweat encrusted shirts.
A frequent collaborator, Burns co-founded W.A.G.E (Working Artists in the Great Economy) an artists’ advocacy group that works to establish a sustainable model for fiscal equity between artists and institutions that contract their labor. Burns additionally co-edited «Randy», an annual transfeminist arts magazine from 2010-2013, and released a compendium publication in June 2016. Working in collaboration with A.L. Steiner, Burns created the feature-length socio-sexual video, Community Action Center (2010), (currently on view at the New Museum, NY) which re-imagines pornographic cinema for women and non-binary bodies. Burns also maintains an ongoing collaborative practice with partner Katherine Hubbard, producing performance installations, videos and sculptures, as well as staging The Poetry Parade … (2012-ongoing), a series of live literary interventions in museums.
A.K. Burns’ work has been exhibited internationally at the New Museum, NY; the Tate Modern, London; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; The Sculpture Center, NY; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA. Burns was a 2016-17 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and a recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award. A Smeary Spot (2015) debuted at Participant Inc., NY, and was subsequently exhibited at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR and again this fall at Human Resources, in Los Angeles. Living Room (2017) debuted at the New Museum, NY and Burns is currently at work on the third installment of Negative Space commissioned by EMPAC at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. Burns currently teaches at Hunter College Graduate Department of Art & Art History, and in the Sculpture Department at NYU Steinhardt.
