Stranger in the Village

GARY BURNLEY
November 6 – December 31, 2020

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