WORKS OF ACTIVIST 'ARTIST' CHALLENGE SENSES
Picture this: Pieces of fingers and broken shards of bone. Marlboro packs, Pepsi cans, computer keyboards Scissors, hammers, hands with paintbrushes in them, a severed arm with a saw. A flower with a clock face where the pistil and stamen should be.
Lots of words: exhortations, endearments, musings, pronouncements "Put your ideas here" We are broken" "Our bone tree is fragile and pure' Your left hand is tolerance and rest" We are surgeons." We can breathe and swim and love" Enjoy your AIDS."
This is art by Bruce Burris, full of compulsive dot patterns, crowded with shapes that interlock and overlap and project their messages next to other shapes, painted in colors that for the most part, hit the eyes like glaring neon lights.
At first you wince. Then you feel challenged. You begin to notice that there might be narratives threading through these conglomerations. There just might be a method to this madness.
A statement on a bottle could be an alcoholic's despairing complaint. A bird with the single word "FEEL" on it seems to speak of hope, but the messages on its birdhouse or sharp pointed instrument on the expanding cry from its beak complicate the meaning.
A show of Burris' works opens Saturday at The Hip Joynt, 115 South Upper Street. According to the invitation, the artist invites "Dear You" to an opening reception there from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. Saturday. Perhaps the public should take a look. The work is sort of like Howard Finster meets Terence McKenna (the latter-day philosopher of cultural psychedelia): a flashily designed barrage of logos and flat imagery, simple but savvy, laid out like a picnic -- only there's too much to feast the eyes on in 10 afternoons. Go to the reception, by all means, but you'll have to go back to the bar restaurant on a weekday and sit there for another hour with a beer and a sandwich because you'll want to scavenge again for tidbits. Take a friend or two, because when two or more people are viewing Burris' work, it's always a case of someone next to you exclaiming, "Look at this!" and pointing out something you might have missed. You'll find yourself doing the same. In other wards, viewing Burris'' work is an interactive sport in a very real sense, not necessarily always in the interior sense.
It is "social" at the core in another sense, too.
Burris is what many people consider to be an "art activist." He is well known (and has received grant money) for his work teaching "marginalized" people how to see as artists, how to concentrate, how to imagine, how to produce something of value. Teaching "the disenfranchised, largely forgotten and most deeply vulnerable members of our society" (as one writer called the group Burris targets as students) is a way of giving them a voice equal to that possessed by those who are "empowered" in society -- the rich, the happy, the "normal."
His work also speaks for them.
In a brochure that was published in conjunction with an exhibit he had at the Macon (Georgia) Museum of Arts Sciences recently, Burris was quoted as saying: "The people that show up in my paintings are not merely symbols. They're representative of people I've always known, worked with and cared for. I try to paint as well as I can about the people who have affected me and challanged me and revealed truths to me about what it means to be alive."
This work is certainty alive -- or at least lively and enlivening. If you missed his show at ArtsPlace a few months back, here's the chance to see what Burris' art is all about.
All Contents © Copyright 1997 Lexington Herald-Leader. All Rights Reserved