kristian burford
Nye + Brown is pleased to present a new work by Kristian Burford. Following his tradition
of life sized mis-en scéne, Burford has created an intricate tableau of danger and intrigue. In this instance Burford installs his subject, a nude male figure, in a nameless hotel room. Yet
anonymity is removed as we enter Burford’s fiction. We are immersed in the environment and
thus implicated in the narrative, becoming essential in the completion of the piece. For Burford it is the viewer that is the central character around which all other elements of the work rotate. The title resembles a stage prompt and provides the initial cues:
Last night you brought a man up to your room after having a late drink at the
hotel bar. Knowing that you are HIV positive you had sex which caused him to bleed. After a day of meetings you now return to your room.
We view the figure reflected in a mirror as we enter through the room’s door and down
a corridor to the interior space. The figure is slightly haunched, his confrontational gaze seers into us. Here happens the transcendence, the transference from reality to the imaginary. Invoking an 80’s mileaux, in which the AIDS virus presented a terminal prospect to
the sufferer, we, in character have infected the subject upon whom we look with a deadly
disease. It is death, the ultimate other, staring back at us. In a sense we have created a being in our own image in which the binary of life and death is overcome. Burford’s tender machinations conjure thoughts of lust, morality and mortality.
Kristian Burford was born in Waikerie, Australia in 1974. He is a graduate of the University of South Australia, and received his MFA at the Art Center School of Design in
Los Angeles. His work has been widely shown in the US and abroad. Museum exhibitons include The Uncanny, curated by Mike Kelly, at the Tate Liverpool and the Museum Moderner Kunst Vienna; The National Sculpture Award Exhibition, National Gallery of
Australia, and Robert, solo show, at the Contemporary Arts Center of South Australia, Adelaide. Recent gallery shows include The Happy Lion, Los Angeles, I-20, New York
Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin and Magrorocca in Milan. Burford lives and works in Los Angeles and Adelaide, Australia.
previous work
rebecca ... 2006
christopher ... 2002 – 2008
kathryn ... 2006
robert has also lost interest in his garden 2002 – 2008
melissa ... 2006
press, bio, exhibit history
artforum, 2006
In his first solo exhibition at I-20, Kristian Burford remained committed to a methodology inspired by elements of the work of Hans Bellmer and Marcel Duchamp. The most direct prec-
edent for Rebecca ..., 2006-2007 (the full title is rather longer), as with every previous piece
this young artist has shown, is Duchamp’s Etant donnes ..., 1946-66, which sets a figurative sculpture within an environmental mise-en-scene that can only be viewed from a fixed, restricted perspective. Likewise, Burford demonstrates an interest in the process of reducing the concrete materiality of sculpture to a virtual condition. Likewise also, he precisely locates the
fault line between the outlying material world and the internal “life of the mind” in the sexual imagination. Burford’s works are essentially fantasies shaped into aesthetic propositions.
Appropriately, the work’s point of departure is a narrative that the artist relates to us by way of highly literary titles, Rebecca’s running to five paragraphs. Rebecca, it begins, has returned to the house in which she grew up to convalesce after waking from a coma three
months ago. This once-athletic woman has been completely paralyzed in a diving accident,
Burford goes on to relate, in a passage that treats the moment of impact with the water’s surface as a metaphor for the viewer’s own troubled encounter with the picture plane. Thus
primed, viewers followed a darkening corridor leading to the back of the gallery. There,
the gap in a slightly ajar door looked onto the supine figure of a woman on a bed. Shown
alone--or seemingly so, as Burford suggests (in the title) that someone else is hiding there-Rebecca has been literally “dolled up” by the youngest members of her family to resemble a ballerina in action. “Inspired by a favorite picture book” of scenes from the Royal Ballet,
her pose appears at once strictly determined and lax. As Burford articulates it, the pose of Rebecca’s body stubbornly resists the illusion of suspended movement intrinsic to the pho-
tograph, only to assert the more complex sculptural illusion of inertia, a will that has been physically incapacitated. Just like a doll, she seems to have been tossed callously aside, yet her expression is ambiguous.
Lining up for an optimal view like the audience at a peep show, we are drawn, one by one, into
this fantasy world. Entering this scenario, one certainly feels a sinister charge, yet the narrative rationale of Rebecca gradually gives way to allow for objective consideration of the scene’s
artforum, 2006
construction. The underlying play between the image-based nature of the painterly tableau and the actuality of its sculptural parts--a signature element of Burford’s work--is here further complicated by references to photography and dance.
The artist’s decision to include a tabletop display of studies for Rebecca at the entrance of the
installation proper is similarly novel and reminds us that, amid this collection of found bric-abrac, the only thing that is made from scratch is the figure itself--this body that is not simply
cast but first molded with skill and empathy by another body, becoming the point of convergence of a series of increasingly complex associations between art and life, modernity and history, the symbolic and the real. Although at a voyeuristic remove, we are clearly implicated in
the long-standing artistic tendency to twist the female form for avant-garde ends. But Burford is less interested in leveling a moral judgment or reproach than in raising the stakes of looking.
The body of Rebecca is our plaything, yet a hint of self-satisfaction curls her lip, suggesting that, in art at least, one is never quite sure who is in control
los angeles times, 2006
The front door of the Happy Lion opens into a long, dark corridor. Feel your way to the end, turn a corner and the darkness envelops you. You begin to notice the faint chirping of
birds. The concrete beneath your feet turns to soft, thick carpet, and it feels like stepping into another world — one you’re not entirely sure you should be stepping into. Just ahead, you see a door standing slightly ajar and a chill goes down your spine.
It’s an exquisitely unnerving buildup with an appropriately creepy payoff. Peek through the door (it won’t open more than a few inches) and you see the eerily realistic figure of a mostly nude woman, sprawled across a bed in a large, fully furnished room.
A pink chiffon dressing gown spills out beneath her; on her feet are what look like ballet
slippers, with ribbons that wind up around her ankles. There are pink roses strewn everywhere, and a vase on its side on the floor. There are four empty glasses with straws on a side table, and a book with photographs of ballerinas lying open on the carpet.
The installation is the work of Australian-born, L.A.-based artist Kristian Burford, whose
last show with the gallery, in 2003, was a similarly staged tableau involving a young male figure, “Christopher.” The short title for this work is “Rebecca”; the long title, which you’ll find on a printout near the entrance to the installation, takes up an entire page and explains the scene in curiously specific narrative detail.
The story is less horrific than you might first imagine (she’s not dead) but may be ultimately more distressing, thanks to the eloquent and tender realism with which it’s relayed.
There is a worthy tradition of pointedly sensationalistic three-dimensional tableaux, descended from Duchamp’s “Given: 1. The Waterfall / 2. The Illuminating Gas” and Ed
Kienholz’s “Back Seat Dodge ‘38,” but this is something different: more along the lines of a character study.
Though startling at a glance — the graphic immodesty of the woman’s posture is difficult to ignore — the work aims less to shock than to elicit empathy, and in that regard it suc-
los angeles times, 2006
ceeds admirably. It’s disturbing not because it’s graphic but because it’s absorbing and has such a convincing air of truth.
“Rebecca has returned to the house in which she grew up,” the story begins, “to convalesce
after waking from a coma three months ago. She awoke to discover that her body was paralyzed from the neck down.”
She sustained the injury in a diving accident, the text explains, and spent 164 days in a
coma. Her attitude in the wake of the accident, though never outlined explicitly, seems to waver between despondent and sardonic.
Since returning home, “she has endured a sparse but consistent pattern of visitations from
friends and family brave enough to witness the wretchedness of her condition — or in-
nocent enough to fail to comprehend it.” On this particular afternoon it is the latter, in the form of twin 7-year-old nieces who’ve developed a game that involves dressing and arranging Rebecca’s immobile body to approximate imagined characters.
Just now, with a perversity that only she seems fully able to appreciate, they’ve chosen to make her a ballerina. At the moment we happen upon the scene, one girl has disappeared to the garden, where she will be caught pillaging her grandfather’s carefully tended roses, while the other hides in the closet behind her aunt’s bed.
“Recognizing that Simone has taken an excessively long time to return to her room,” the text concludes, “Rebecca has correctly surmised her circumstance and now considers the certainty of her own discovery with satisfying indifference.”
Between the unsettling prologue, the absorbing atmosphere, the carefully wrought detail,
and the resounding punch line, with its clever ensnarement of the unsuspecting viewer
(since it is the viewer, of course, who will discover the spectacle), the piece has all the magic of a good short story and leaves you with much to ponder.
new york times, 2004
Sherry Wong and Kristian Burford, I-20 Gallery, 529 West 20th Street, (212) 645-1100, through Jan. 29. With unfussy immediacy, on birch panels, Ms. Wong draws and paints
psychologically pregnant images of herself in fairy tale situations: wandering in enchanted
forests, mugged by a tree-man, a slayer of wild animals. Mr. Burford offers an impressively realized Freudian peep show: through holes in a curtained enclosure, you behold a naked young man — hyperrealistically rendered in fiberglass — sprawled on a bed in an
old sewing room (his late mother’s, the wall text says) with his fingers dangling in a goblet of water (Johnson).
artforum, 2003
The focal point of Kristian Burford’s latest installation, Chistopher..., 2003, is a hyperrealistic fiberglass sculpture of a nude young man who lies across a bed, the fingers of one
hand dangling into a goblet filled with water. As the work’s full title (which runs to over a hundred words) explains, the setting is the young man’s dead mother’s sewing room, and he’s put his hand in the goblet in an attempt to bring about some self-induced bed-
wetting. Intimations of an especially unsavory family romance are amplified by the room’s decor, a slovenly profusion of bedspreads, throw pillows, and old suitcases. The whole
scene is enclosed in a rectangular structure made of curtains draped over a frame; visitors have to peer through apertures in the fabric, a mode of viewing that mimics hermetic,
scopophiliac entertainments like the nickelodeon and the peep show. Christopher... is the
fifth in a series of similar mixed-media tableaux, which Burford calls “houses.” Architecturally, the works resemble houses only in the most rudimentary sense, but they do seem to capture everything that’s unheimlich about home.
sullivan + strumpf, 2006
Kristian Burford’s strange life-size domestic settings use meticulously clay sculpted figures cast in resin to depict psychologically intense private moments. He utilizes features
from any canon at hand — gothic, baroque, romanticism, symbolism, surrealism, b-grade
pornography — to evoke a particular nostalgia just this side of innocent. Voyeurism plays an important role and his characters seem naughty, perhaps erotic, as they are forced from
the private into the public. Michael Newall writes in the art journal Broadsheet, “the
figures Burford portrays have lost control …this loss of control is …it involves a sort of letting go, a surrender of self to these desires and sensations which, in this moment of selfabnegation, become sublime…in surrendering to these forces, in giving themselves over to them, they might get a momentary intimation of a dissolution of the self in the world. And if we can bring ourselves to empathize with them, so might we”.
realtime, 2002
Kathryn who is thirteen years old, is staying after school at her grandparent’s house. It is
nine o’clock on a November evening. She has escaped the company of her grandparents
to play with her grandmothers’ cat, which is a queen named Lucy, by moving into the sunroom of her grandparent’s house. After some minutes of happily petting the cat it has
turned on Kathryn, penetrating the skin of her left index finger with its fangs and raising
three lines of skin on her left wrist with the claws of its left paw. In response to Lucy’s attack, Kathryn has grabbed at the cat in an effort to disentangle herself from it. She has been fortunate enough to find the cat’s collar with three fingers of her right hand. This has
allowed her sufficient purchase on Lucy’s slippery form to remove the cat to the carpeted
floor of the sunroom. Kathryn has placed her injured finger in her mouth so as to contain
her pain and her blood. She has then recognised that she has wet herself and has, simultaneously, taken the finger from her mouth. 2001. Photo courtesy of the artist.
kristian burford 2000-2002 1992-1995
Master of Fine Arts. Art Center College of Design, California
Bachelor of Fine Art with First Class Honors, University of South Australia
selected exhibitions 2008
Christopher, Michael Janssen Gallery, Berlin, Germany
temporary, Los Angeles, California, USA
2007
2006
2005 2004
2003-4
2003 2002
2001
2000
1999
All That Heaven Allows, Curated by Lisa Tchakmakian, Bonelli Con Kathryn, Magroroca, Milan, Italy
Outdoor sculpture projects, Volta, Basel, Switzerland Rebecca, I-20, New York, NY
Sullivan+Strumpf 2007, Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art, Sydney, Australia Melissa and Robert, Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art, Sydney, Australia Rebecca, The Happy Lion, Los Angeles, California
Sullivan and Strumpf 2006, Sullivan+Strumpf Fine Art, Sydney, Australia
Kindle and Swag, University of South Australia Art Museum, Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Australia.
The Uncanny, Curated by Mike Kelley, Museum Moderner Kunst Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria; Tate Liverpool, Liverpool, England Christopher, I-20, New York, NY, USA
Christopher, The Happy Lion, Los Angeles, CA, USA
New York Calling, Aust. Studio at PS1, New York, NY, USA Morbid Curiosity , I-20 New York, NY, USA
National Sculpture Award Exhibition, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award. Melbourne, Victoria, Australia Pals Forever, University of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australia.
Wunderkinder, group show, Top Floor Gallery, Adelaide, South Australia
Robert, solo show, Contemporary Arts Center of South Australia, Adelaide.
Moet & Chandon Australia Art Foundation Touring Exhibition, State Gal
National Gallery Canberra, Australia
1998 1997
1996
leries of: South Australia; New South Wales; Victoria; Queensland and the Underbelly, group show, Cosmopolitan Centre, Adelaide, South Australia
Procrustean Bed, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, South Australia Smoke Rings, group show, FAD Gallery, Adelaide, South Australia. ECCE GUBERNATOR, SEAS Gallery, Adelaid, South Australia
selected bibliography —
Walleston, A. ‘Interview with Kristian Burford’ The Last
—
Tumlir, J. ‘The Erotic Imagination’ Photophile #83, Winter 2008.
— — — — — — — — — —
Magazine Fall 2008
Costa, C. ‘Seminario per detective d’arte’, Arte. November 2007 Tumlir, J. ‘Kristian Burford’, Artforum, May 2007.
Myers, H. ’Rebecca creates a frozen tableau’ Los Angeles Times, Friday, May 26, 2006.
Walker, W. ‘The Samstag Legacy: The man, the program and the art’ Australian Art Monthly, April 2005.
Di Girolamo, R. ‘Nude too Rude for the U.S.’ The Weekend Australian,
3-4th April Clement, T. ‘Peeping Tom’ The Sydney Morning Herrald. 17- 23rd November 2004.
Bogle, D. ‘Cover Charge’ The Bulletin with Newsweek, 7th April 2004. Nunn, L. ‘Local Talent Too Hot for U.S. Book Retail Chain’ The Adelaide Advertiser, 7th April 2004.
Radok, S. Editorial and Cover, Artlink Magazine Australia, March 2004 Vol 24 no. 1.
Johnson. ‘ A selective listing By the critics of the New York Times’ New York Times 23rd Jan 2004.
Schamblelan, E. Review of ‘Christopher…’ Artforum.com, 19th Jan 2004.
—
Searle, A. Review of ‘The Uncanny’ The Guardian, London, 24th Feb 2004.
The Female Nude Now Universe/Rizzoli Park Ave New York. 2003.
— — — — — — — —
Ebony. Harris. Richard. Schwender. Valdez. Yablonsky.(Eds.) CURVE: Tumlir, J. ‘Morbid Curiosity’ Artext, Fall 2002.
Tumlir, J. Morbid Curiosity Exhibition Catalogue I-20 Gallery, ISBN 0-9725, 2002.
Robinson, W. ‘Weekend update’ Artnet.com, 9th April 2002. Newall, M. ‘Artist Profile,’ RealTime, Vol 48, 2002.
Newall, M. ‘Wish Fulfillment,’ Broadsheet, Vol 31. No 1 Autumn 2002. Wowne, W. Doingbird #3, summer 2002.
Bilske, M. ‘The Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award,’ Sculpture Magazine, Vol. 20 No. 7, Sept. 2001.
prizes, awards & grants 2005
Australia Council for the Arts, New Work Grant
2001
The Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship
2004
Australia Council for the Arts, New Work Grant.
(Supplementary).
The Natianal Sculpture Award Exhibition (Australia).
1999
Moet & Chandon Australian Art Foundation touring exhibition.
2000
1997 1995 1996
The Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award (Australia). The Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship SAYAB, Project Grant. SAYAB, Project Grant.
EVA 97, First in sculpture
SAYAB, Artists in Studios Grant. SAYAB, Artists in Studios Grant Carclew, Project Gran
2685 south la cienega blvd. los angeles, ca 90034 gallery@nyeplusbrown.com 310 559 5215
this project has been assisted by the australian government through the australia council, its arts funding and advisory body.