BRUCE BURRIS
Bruce Burris is an artist who has spent most of his adult life working with the disenfranchised, largely forgotten, and most deeply vulnerable members of our society - people ignored by the mass media, or degraded as mere statistics.
Burris makes paintings that reveal these statistics as dismissals of human beings, each of whom has his or her own ornate and painful story, each of whom has a unique voice. His large acrylic paintings are explosively colorful, always wildly intricate in their design, usually incorporating words that Burris uses to tell the "stories" he has witnessed in his years of work with homeless children and adults, mentally disabled men and women, victims of poverty, addiction, sexual abuse, and violence. These stories are fragments of poetry which begin narratives so compelling and deeply felt that the thoughtful viewer is lassoed into entering the world of the painting, and thus of its subjects. Burris' characters are represented figuratively only by the occasional primitively rendered, fragmented body parts; arms, genitals, hands, feet, and bones are exposed just as those ravaged by neglect are exposed in our society. These fragments combine to create a universe of chaos barely tamed by form. The voices, floating in the unsettling political atmosphere of the canvas, cry out "Listen To Me" or "I'm Twelve and Drunk" pleas that must compete with the noise of consumer culture - Pepsi cans, Marlboro boxes, IBM logos, Mobil motor oil Labels, and guns.
Burris' paintings, like his politics, are enormously complex, but without the cool irony that often accompanies an understanding of complexity. They are the paintings of an artist fully engaged, enraged, and committed to the world of the human beings to whom he has dedicated his life. This ultimately makes them hopeful works of art. In Our National Theatre, he includes the note, "Dear You, You gave me your winter coat. You bled for me. You gave me your dictionary, Love, Me." Burris obviously understands the role of language in powerlessness, and knows a dictionary is as important as a coat.
Because Burris recognizes and believes in hope as a necessity, his paintings are never so despairing that one can't find little messages of light in the darkness. These hopeful notes are so painfully believable because they exist within symbols of hopelessness, suggesting that good cannot be cleanly separated from evil, that if there are answers, they are not easy ones."We can breathe and swim and Love" is a voice caught in a bottle of alcohol. "We are Surgeons" is written across a prisoner's saw. Burris speaks of the connection between the empowered and the powerless, the rich and the poor, the happy and the despairing.
Everyone is implicated here, and everyone is invited. "Put Your Ideas Here," Burris urges the spectator in National Theatre. "You can Think and Bleed," he reminds us in Make Your Own History, as if to say, "These are your gifts in the midst of sorrow. Use them." - Jane McCafferty
BRUCE BURRIS lives in Kentucky. He is the Director of ARTREE , an organization which of offers art studio workshops to artists who are homeless and others who are, or feel, equally disenfranchised.
Jane McCafferty is the author of Director of The World and Other Stories, which received the 1992 Drue Heinz Award for fiction. In 1993 she received an NEA award for fiction.