EXHIBITION CATALOG | Stranger in the Village by 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.