AND THEN…

For his first solo exhi­bi­tion in Mel­bourne, and his first exhi­bi­tion at Anna Schwartz Gallery, Ian Burns presents a num­ber of sculp­tures that con­tin­ue to explore the man­u­fac­tured screen image. Refer­ring in title to the sim­plis­tic and lit­tle-nuanced plots of pulp fic­tion, AND THEN… pro­vides a space in which we might become more con­scious of the images we con­sume on a dai­ly basis.

Incor­po­rat­ing and some­times gen­er­at­ing sound and image, burns’ ​‘meta-cin­e­mat­ic’ mon­u­ments invoke pop­u­lar mov­ing imagery and by exten­sion the cul­ture which pro­duces them. Burns builds these audio- visu­al-sculp­tur­al forms in order to reveal the clichés of con­tem­po­rary screen cul­ture. With­out ignor­ing the con­text of his own pro­duc­tion, Burns’ cri­tique of mind­less images also extends to those con­tem­po­rary art prac­tices that sim­i­lar­ly play upon the objects famil­iar to dai­ly life. Com­prised of found objects, each sculp­ture con­tains with­in it a unique nar­ra­tive. For exam­ple, the coin­ci­dence of dis­cov­er­ing a clam-shaped, children’s swim­ming pool, along with some dis­card­ed man­nequins, led the artist to Botticelli’s ​‘Birth of Venus’. What ensues is a unique exten­sion of the metaphor, as Venus – through Burns – gives birth to video. This brings us to the under­ly­ing essence of Burns’ work: while crit­i­cal­ly bring­ing to light com­plex the­o­ries about pop­u­lar cul­ture and the enter­tain­ment indus­try, these works con­tain a nec­es­sary dose of humour – mak­ing them utter­ly compelling.