Exhibitions

Born in 1964 in Newcastle (Australia).
Lives and works in New-York.

Website : www.ianburns.net
Gallery : www.hilger.at

Ian Burns, an Australian-born artist living in New York, has been present on the art scene for a good many years now.  More recently, we have seen his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, Australia), at the St. Louis Museum of Contemporary Art, at the Museum Villa Rot (Burgrieden, Germany), at the Haus der Kulteren der Welt in Berlin and at the University Art Museum of South Florida.  He has also displayed his work in solo exhibitions in New York, Vienna, Madrid, and Brisbane.  An engineer by training, he then studied art and philosophy. 

From the beginning, he demonstrated a keen interest in the processes and mechanisms of sight and questioned the ability to see and look by using mostly recycled materials. His early work made extensive use of screens, and he dramatized narrative and informative images from our everyday environment in the form of projections or silhouettes. More recently, he started incorporating video in his work, always with mechanical devices put together from common household objects.

A few of his pieces, notably the more radical A promise of more, which is exhibited here, use only light and its different physical properties not only to question the appearance and disappearance of the image and of the sense, but also to explore the power and phenomenological potentials of domestic appliances and everyday objects. By manipulating household objects, by inventing new modes of operation for them, and by using them in a capacity and a function other than the intended one, Ian Burns provokes the curiosity of the viewer while appealing to the sense of the absurd and to perplexity. 

A promise of more combines electric light bulbs of a unique color (the work was done during a stay in Ireland where this very peculiar light bulb called "Fireglow" is marketed) and a set of magnifying lenses purchased at a local store, all expertly arranged in a wood-framed sculpture vaguely reminiscent of fairground booths or carnival floats.  This work directly calls to the viewer by projecting the word "YOU" on the wall.  The characters are constructed from the individual bulb filaments into a humble invitation or a hasty accusation.  In the context of BIP2012, this illuminated and moving "YOU" is also a complex and fragile emanation of the "other," the one one calls, expects, hates, idealizes …  The work is a tribute to the persona of the "other," in all its possible shapes and forms. 

AFL / AFH (Based on the texts published on the website of the Triangle Arts Association and Gallery Hilger Contemporary).