Amanda Burnham
Above: Great, Good, Fine, 2008
Amanda Burnham uses drawing in her work to investigate and record evolving urban and suburban built landscapes. Her most recent body of drawings and installational work, inspired by the urban landscape of Baltimore ("Amanda Burnham/ Denominator") can be viewed from November 3rd - December 10th, 2008, at the Julio Art Gallery at Loyola College of Maryland. Her work has been exhibited extensively; selected venues include the Dorsch Gallery (Miami, FL), GV/AS Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Harrington Arts (San Francisco, CA), The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, The Toledo Museum of Art, and the Cranbrook Institute of Art. She is also very involved in collaborative work with writers; a book, "Never Cry Woof," featuring her drawings alongside the work of poet Shafer Hall, was published by No Tell Books last year.
Amanda holds BA and MFA degrees from Harvard and Yale, and is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Towson University. Despite having traversed the east coast for the better part of the last decade, she was born in Toledo, Ohio (1979) and traces her fascination with derelict warehouses, sign architecture, purposeless and repurposed spaces, and cars to that city's rust belt landscape.
Installation view: Marginalia
Statement
I build pictorial landscapes based on the American landscape and the values it encodes, using the genre as a framework to reflect upon the ways that individuals are challenged by and adapt to an increasingly alienating corporate culture.
The metaphorical opposition of discreet spaces is often central to my drawings, as in Manifest Destiny, where a gritty, ruined home sits opposite a distant mountainscape. Messy personal reality fails to join with idealized spectre: the path which seemingly connects the two spaces never actually reaches the foreground.
The Shock of the New also opposes discreet spaces: here billboard advertisements replace the mountain as the unattainable locus of desire. A truck enters a vast, disintegrating city, from which the car poised outward on the crisp center billboard embodies a deceptive hope of escape. I thought about the false promises of advertising, as well as telling ironies exposed by unplanned environmental juxtapositions (i.e, glossy billboards advertising luxury goods to speeding commuters planted in neglected roadside urban spaces).
In concert with these contrasts and asymmetries, labyrinthine composition has emerged as a primary thematic in my work. Through caricatured representations of haphazardly constructed cities and suburbs, I reflect on individual alienation in contemporary life. The viewer floats precariously before a maze of fences winding about a steep hill in the foreground of Front Lines. Nearby, bold, declarative billboard text unravels into broken letterforms. The composition encloses the viewer in an obstacle-ridden space that can only be tripped through. Similarly, Gulf places the viewer on a slick parking lot before a precipice: beyond the gap, point of view illogically shifts, and impermeable buildings interlock, forming an unnavigable mass. The illusionistic space in Sup is literally blocked by a plastic sign: the margins make clear that the drawing continues beneath, but access is barred.