Sunday, Jun 2, 2019
Visiting Artist: A.K. Burns
About
Lighthouse Works is pleased to welcome A.K. Burns to Fishers Island for the weekend of June 1, 2019 as part of our Visiting Artist Program.
In addition to conducting critical studio visits with our fellows, A.K. will be presenting her work at an Artist Talk which is open to the public on Sunday, June 2 at 11:15 am. The talk will take place at Lighthouse Works which is located just west of Silver Eel Cove, where our ferry makes port, and north of the intersection of Hound Lane and Greenwood Road.
*A.K. Burns is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Brooklyn, NY. Using video, sculpture and installation she produces queries into the socio-political constructs that give form and meaning to contemporary notions of the body. Currently, Burns is developing Negative Space, a cycle of five video installations that take speculative fiction as a point of departure. The third installment was commissioned by EMPAC at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, and has a forthcoming exhibition commissioned by the Julia Stoschek Collection. Burns’ work has been exhibited internationally at the New Museum, NY; the Tate Modern, London; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; The Sculpture Center, NY; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA. Burns was a 2016-17 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, a recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award, and is currently faculty at Hunter College Graduate Department of Art & Art History.
- Our Visiting Artist Program invites nationally recognized artists to Fishers Island to engage in a critical dialogue with our fellows and to present their work to our community. An invaluable resource to our fellows and community alike, the Visiting Artist Program seeks to foster a greater understanding and appreciation of contemporary art and writing.
Artist
Bio
A.K. Burns is a interdisciplinary artist and educator based in New York. Using video, installation, sculpture, drawing, and collaboration, Burns explores systems of value and the body as a contentious domain wherein socio-political issues are negotiated.
A.K. Burns has exhibited internationally including recently at Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; MMK Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, Germany; FRONT International: The Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art in Cleveland, OH; The Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, MA; and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, in Portland OR. Burns is currently completing a decade long endeavor titled Negative Space which includes a cycle of four multi-channel video installations that take science fiction as a point of departure. The series of works was introduced with, A Smeary Spot debuting at Participant Inc., NY in 2015, followed by Living Room in 2017 at The New Museum, NY. In 2019 the third work in the series Leave No Trace, premiered at the Julia Stoschek Collection in Dusseldorf, Germany and the work was produced with the support of EMPAC at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York.
A.K. Burns is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2021 Art Purchase Program, was a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Interdisciplinary Art, a 2016 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University, and a 2015 Creative Capital Foundation Visual Arts Award recipient.
As a frequent collaborator; Burns was a founding member of W.A.G.E (Working Artists in the Greater Economy) in 2008—an artists’ advocacy group that remains active as a non-profit certification organization for Arts Institutions nationally. Created in collaboration with A.L. Steiner, Community Action Center, a video re-imagining pornographic cinema for queer womxn, trans and non-binary bodies was released in 2010 and has since been collected by the MoMA and The Julia Stoschek Collection. The work was also named one of “The 25 Works of Art That Define the Contemporary Age” by the New York Times in 2019. In 2010, Burns also began a collaborative practice with partner Katherine Hubbard, producing performance installations, videos and sculptures as well as staging The Poetry Parade…, at the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Whitney Museum of American Art, all in NY.
A.K. Burns is an Associate Professor and the New Genres Area Head at Hunter College, Department of Art & Art History. Burns is currently represented by Michel Rein Gallery, Paris/Brussels, and Video Data Bank, Chicago.