Amanda Burnham: Marginalia
Saturday, September 12, 2009 - Saturday, October 3, 2009
Opening reception Saturday, September 12, 2009, 7:00 PM - 10:00 PM
Amanda Burnham's show "Marginalia" will consist of works on paper and an installation, both modes presenting both her view of today's urban landscape and her insight into how it is seen. She quotes Rainer Maria Rilke:
Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.
Burnham writes, "Writ large on the surfaces of urban space in thousands of ways is the tension between the organism of cities and the greatest hopes of their individual architects and residents. I am moved by the ways cities don't work. Painting on a wall, I tease out the edges of nameable things, then suppress them in silhouette, or literally fence them in. Drawing quickly and voluminously with ink on small, heavy, and unevenly deckled pages resembling chipped paint, I seek to record, from as many vantage points as I can see and imagine, the hysteria, confusion, and loneliness arising from the confrontation between individuals and the overwhelming, unknowable structures of cities."
Benjamin Lima writes that her work "allows us to explore directly [...] symbolic aspects of these vernacular environments [that] remain hidden or implicit when we see only their surfaces, as in photographs." This will be Burnham's second solo show with Dorsch Gallery. She has an MFA from Yale University and a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard. She had a solo show at Loyola College in 2008 and has had work in group shows around the country. She is Assistant Professor at the Art Department at Towson University, Towson MD and lives in Baltimore, MD.
King, 2009, ink and watercolor on paper, 14 x 20 inches
Guilford, 2009, ink and watercolor on paper, 12 x 16 inches
refund, 2009, ink and watercolor on paper, 16 x 18 inches
Mt. Royal, 2009, ink and watercolor on paper, 12.5 x 16 inches
LIIQUQS, 2009, media