EXHIBITION: Stranger in the Village
Stranger in the Village
GARY BURNLEY
NOVEMBER 6 - DECEMBER 31, 2020
The Artist Studio, 2019. Unique Archival Inkjet Photo and Mixed Media Physical Collage, 14.5 x 21.5 inches
Opening Reception: Friday, November 6th, from 11am - 5pm
Candela Gallery is pleased to present Stranger in the Village by Connecticut based artist and educator, Gary Burnley. Titled after a seminal essay by James Baldwin, Burnley's series, comprised of formal collages, challenges and re-imagines historical portraiture and other narrative, painting conventions emblematic of western culture and history. The artist's process is intuitive, drawing from personal, historical, and collective experiences; each piece is cut from reproductions of traditional portraits, sketches, family archive imagery and yearbook photographs, then carefully reconstructed allowing new meanings to emerge.
Throughout history, the nature of portraiture has both symbolically and directly referenced status, privilege, import, beauty, or societal relevance. By physically recontextualizing these conventional motifs, Burnley blends abrading narratives to reveal the power, resiliency, and strength of the Black American life. Myth and reality combine seamlessly in these works, but these combined characters, re-assembled from different races and distant times and places, offer vignettes, sometimes subtle and sometimes confrontational, which directly reference issues of race and class and violence which we continue to grapple with today.
The exhibition will be on view from November 6th through December 31st. Feel free to stop by the gallery or email us at info@candelabooks.com to schedule an appointment.
Gary Burnley, Smile, 2019. Archival inkjet photo, unique mixed media physical collage, 22 x 17 inches
STATEMENT FROM THE ARTIST
Black Americans live in a different world or perhaps a more accurate description would be we live in the same world differently. Western culture historically associates art with the desire for power and influence. Growing up with neither, conflict and contrast, not art and artists, were a part of my world. I have been told I was a very observant child. Raised by a single mother who worked long hours, I spent much of my time alone, peering out the front-room window, imagining. Becoming an artist was a way of imagining everything around me differently. That was the primary fantasy.
I think of being an artist and the work I do as a way of inserting myself into domains where historically I would have been absent. The physical collages and stereographic devices I construct coerce images from dissimilar and often contradictory points of reference to exchange features, traits, and dividends in the eye and mind of the viewer. Moments that result from these exchanges trespass upon and shift vernaculars, disrupting the reading of familiar narratives by disarming generally accepted interpretations of the images, nudging the emphasis towards a discovery of what could not be anticipated or expected.
For example, historically the portrait has been an interlocutor in the cultural dialogue concerning beauty, power, influence, identity, and social status. One of the unfailing functions of a portrait is to validate and give permanence to the world it describes and to the persons that inhabited that world. A portrait predictably fixes in the mind of the viewer the immortality of the profiles, ideals, and attitudes it depicts while, at the same time without ambiguity or uncertainty, marginalizes any irregularities or competing traits. Never seen as possessing the humanity, dignity, statue and/or inner life commensurate with the objectives of a portrait, throughout history images of Black women, Black men and Black children have been largely invisible or reduced to the uncomplicated characterization of a stranger in the world of the white man’s imagination. My intention is to compel an alternative parable.
I make choices intuitively not always knowing exactly where the process of combining images created in different times and places, by often contradictory sources for seemingly incompatible reasons will take me. I am interested in the questions that their mergers would raise more than definitive answers, interested in the struggle between what could be discovered and what might be lost in the process.
- Gary Burnley
Gary Burnley, Double Portrait, 2019. Archival inkjet photo, unique mixed media physical collage, 42 x 32 inches