Los Angeles artist Brigette Burns debuts a new series of compelling ink and brush drawings on painted paper (paint chips) in her second solo exhibition at Heather Marx Gallery from July 8 through August 14, 2004. Whereas Burns' earlier drawings were comprised of found imagery from commercial sources, these new drawings represent images of people, objects, and places drawn from the artist's personal history. Through this unique visual language, Burns creates intimate images that hauntingly reconstruct her recent past.

Burns no longer relies on the paint chip titles as the catalyst for her imagery. Instead, she now uses the paint chips to build a surface of abstract color on which to lay her forms, erasing all traces of text from the chips. The result is her beautifully deft drawings taking center stage. Her Romanticized titles such as The Memory Suddenly Revealed Itself, The Moment Before, and Breathing Room allude to her new exploration of a more personal state of mind. After creating several drawings on the individual painted paper, the drawings are then, according to Burns, "taken apart repeatedly without rearranging the images in a linear timeline or a narrative of an exact event." By shuffling her elements in this manner, Burns ultimately reveals the memories of a past emotional or mental state.

The artist continues to play brilliantly with the relevance of narrative and compositional structure in her work. A sequence of chips, either horizontal or vertical, will often be interrupted by blank spaces that mimic her cropped subjects. Such spaces offer holes in the narrative, whereby the viewer is challenged to visually "fill in the blanks." Just as Burns reconstructs paint chips in a myriad of constructions, so too is memory reprised, rethought, and ultimately revisited. Not only has Burns demonstrated her command of the medium of brush and ink, she has also succeeded in producing a body of work that is playful, sexy, contemplative, and very much a portrait of herself.

Burns was a recipient of a California Arts Council Grant in 2003 and has shown extensively, including a solo show at Acuna-Hansen Gallery in Los Angeles, the traveling show Representing LA at the Laguna Art Museum in Southern California, and Shores Space in Amsterdam, among others. Her work has been reviewed and featured in Contemporary, the San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate.com, the Orange County Register, the Orange County Weekly, Artweek, and New American Paintings. Her work is also featured in several private and public collections, including the JP Morgan Chase Art Collection in San Francisco and New York. Burns received her BA from New York's Hunter College in 1990.


July 2004 - Steve Zavattero