Mira Burack: from the bed to the mountain

MIRA BUR ACK

2014/15

MIRA BURACK from the bed to the mountain

CUE ART FOUNDATION

MAY 2 - JUNE 6, 2015 1

Each year, CUE invites ten individuals from across the country to anonymously nominate up to three artists for the solo exhibition program. Artists are invited to apply, and the final selection is made by an independent jury each fall. Jurors for the 2014-15 season were Magdalena Sawon, owner/director of Postmasters Gallery; Papo Colo, artist and former founder/director of Exit Art; and Gregory Amenoff, artist and former Chair, Visual Arts, Columbia University School of the Arts.

BOARD OF DIRECTORS Gregory Amenoff Theodore S. Berger Sanford Biggers Thomas G. Devine Thomas K.Y. Hsu Vivian Kuan Corina Larkin Brian D. Starer

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CURATORIAL ADVISORY COUNCIL Gregory Amenoff Katie Cercone Lynn Crawford Trenton Doyle Hancock Pablo Helguera Paddy Johnson Sharon Lockhart Andrea Zittel

CUE FELLOWS

STAFF

Polly Apfelbaum Theodore S.Berger, Chair Ian Cooper William Corbett Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney Deborah Kass Corina Larkin Jonathan Lethem Rossana Martinez Juan Sรกnchez Irving Sandler, Senior Fellow Carolyn Somers Lilly Wei

Dena Muller Executive Director Beatrice Wolert-Weese Deputy Director Hannah Malyn Development Manager Shona Masarin-Hurst Programs Manager Justin Allen Programs Assistant

CUE ART FOUNDATION IS A DYNAMIC VISUAL ARTS CENTER DEDICATED TO CREATING ESSENTIAL CAREER AND EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES FOR EMERGING ARTISTS OF ALL AGES. THROUGH EXHIBITIONS, ARTS EDUCATION, AND PUBLIC PROGRAMS, CUE PROVIDES ARTISTS AND AUDIENCES WITH SUSTAINING AND MEANINGFUL EXPERIENCES AND RESOURCES.

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MIRA BURACK Mira Burack is an artist living in the mountains of New Mexico. She received her Master of Fine Arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art and Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art and Psychology from Pepperdine University. Burack was born in Boston, Massachusetts and grew up on the coast of Maine.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Muskegon Museum of Art, Cranbrook Art Museum, Media Knox Gallery in Slovenia, Art Gallery of Windsor in Canada, and Kunstverein Wolfsburg in Germany. She has lectured, taught workshops, and served as faculty at the College for Creative Studies. She received a Community + Public Arts: DETROIT grant for The Edible Hut, a community space with a living edible roof.

Recently relocated to rural New Mexico after living in Detroit for 10 years, Burack spends her time learning from this new landscape, making, and enjoying her family.

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STATEMENT My work investigates everyday matter, seeking out an embedded material language that exists between our bodies, our possessions and our environment. In creating spaces, making intricate photography collages, soft sculptures, and installations, I draw connections between the material and the immaterial, the visceral and the technological, two dimensions and three dimensions, and ultimately, the conscious and unconscious.

connecting, layering, and arranging are used to resuscitate the material, bringing us closer to it again with new perspective.

I am engaged by the living sculptures in our daily lives—plants, animals, people, and the interior and exterior spaces around us. I am interested in how they teach us, activate our senses, and provide us with intimacy, comfort, rest, and pleasure.

While making, I explore the physical qualities and historical properties of the materials. The human history of textiles and the illusionary nature of painting influence my way of working. Methods of documenting, multiplying, extracting, cutting,

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IMAGES

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Erasure, 2011 Photography collage installation (photographs of bed comforter) 144� x 72�

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ABOVE

Bench (for resting), 2014 Found wood, paint, cholla cactus fruits 20” x 114” x 11” OPPOSITE

(Domesticated) Bird House, 2015 Found wood container, paint, turkey, goose, and chicken feathers, sound piece in collaboration with Jason Janusch 31” x 51” x 45”

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ABOVE

OPPOSITE

Basket, 2014

Table (detail), 2015

Apple basket, paint, bougainvillea

Found wood, paint, botanicals,

flower petals

photography collages

17” x 17” x 12”

39” x 202” x 20”

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Table (detail), 2015 Turkey feathers, photography collage 5” x 10” x 1.5”

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Table (detail), 2015 Elm oyster mushroom, photography collage 5” x 8” x 2”

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OPPOSITE

ABOVE

FOLLOWING SPREAD

Table (detail), 2014

Table (detail), 2014

from the bed to the mountain (detail), 2015

10” x 17” x 6”

5” x 9” x 3”

Shelf mushroom, photography collage

Pine cones, photography collage

Photography collage (photographs of bed comforter) 552” x 114”

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rain stick, 2015

Plastic, screws, beads, glue 4 x 4 x 16.5 inches

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bunny wreath, 2015 Plastic eggs, basket, easter straw, silicone 6 x 13 x 14.5 inches

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Table (detail), 2015 Found stump, photography collage 14” x 14” x 10”

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Table (detail), 2014 Found wood, photography collage 9” x 14” x 2”

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OPPOSITE

Table (detail), 2015 Aloe flower, photography collage 8” x 22” x 1” FOLLOWING SPREAD (left)

Sun (son), 2015 Photography collage (photographs of blanket), paint 84” x 84” FOLLOWING SPREAD (right)

Moon (mother), 2015 Broom snakeweed plants, twine, paint 84” x 84” x 5”

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taco sun, 2014

Translucent plastic, foam core, hot glue, pigment 0.5 x 17.5 x 18 inches

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WRITING

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COLLAGE AND THE LANDSCAPE OF FAMILIARITY John McKissick

“from the bed to the mountain” evokes Mira Burack’s home in the foothills of the Ortiz Mountains of New Mexico. Elaborated through photocollaged installations and collections of found objects, this landscape of familiarity includes both intimate domestic space and the natural world. Inside and outside meet in the mountainous wall mural leafed together from cutout photos of a rumpled comforter that gives the show its name. In her work, the way to place passes through sleep. And like dreaming, Burack’s practice resuscitates the materiality of vacated things through delicate, non-hierarchical recombination.

Above the large mural of a moonlit mountain range, the gallery walls are painted black. Opposite are the sun and the moon, standing for the artist’s son and 28

mother; the moon a wreath of pale yellow snakeweed bundles, the sun a ring of baby blankets. Material the artist gathered near her home—scavenged wood, a basket of pink bougainvillea, and hanging strands of dried plants—discloses her lifeworld in all its affective density and three-dimensionality. An ambient audio track emanates and the scents of piñon and juniper becalm the space. Burack’s deft recompositions model an intimate world of reverence and familiarity.

Before settling with her husband and young son near her mother’s home in northern New Mexico, Burack lived in Detroit for 10 years, where she received her MFA in fiber and textiles from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Since her 2008 “Plants” series, Burack has mounted cutout photos directly on the wall or floor to create intricate installations whose repetitive motifs seem to ripple outward while remaining stubbornly flat. The forms developed in the “Beds” series resemble cloaks or curtains that spill, puddle, and part. At eye level, ovals of exposed wall painted black appear as voids or mirrors. In Erasure a bird is a fanned plume bored into by the dark; the void grows feathers and takes flight. Relocating from the city to the piñon and juniper high desert, Burack was stirred to reflect on place and domestication. In this new setting, with its remoteness, aridity, and mountain backdrop, Burack shifted from the ambiguity and formality of her most powerful past work and began to use her collage to conjure a landscape.

Each element of combination has been desiccated, domesticated, or followed into night. Plants, fruit, and mushrooms are parched. In Erasure and Sleeping is like Flying the geese whose down fills the comforter

regain flight as dream figures. At CUE, the same comforter lofts the dreamer to the mountain heights.

Sleep itself is a horizontal modality of non-hierarchical elevation. The photographic reduction of an object to its planar image is also a process of domestication.

Enclosed in the dark and then exposed, film captures the light that flees from an object. Walter Benjamin described the photograph as an image that, through reproducibility, has lost its aura. Burack repeats images to produce an effect like that of the iterative patterns in nature. Rather than mechanically compel disenchantment, Burack’s rippling motifs allude to natural forms such as waves, scales, and wings.

It is night. From a blanket and comforter rise sun and moon and mountains. The artist has fashioned a table the height of a bed. Asleep on the table are clusters of feathers, mushrooms, and pinecones.

These arrangements include scale photographic counterparts that double, triple, or “shadow” the original. Like dreaming, collage exercises a freedom of combination across a horizontal field. The overlaid images recapitulate and multiply the original and reanimate it in beguiling forms. In one influential formulation, the organic artwork is composed of parts that are subordinated to the whole, while the “non-organic” collage principle operates by juxtaposition and formal incongruity. By twinning the flattened paper construction with its naturally occurring counterpart, the artist asks us to reconsider whether all processes of mechanical reproduction destroy the wholeness of the original, or whether non-hierarchical principles of construction cannot stage their own recovery of depth. Especially with the blanket-enwrapped sun on the wall, these shadows 29

seem to confirm the botanicals’ substantiality rather than dissipate it.

For much of its history, collage has been identified, by its practitioners as well as by its interpreters, as a vehicle for decontextualization and defamiliarization.

According to one account, montage breaks the unity of the symbolic (or “organic”) artwork into a constellation of fragments linked only by the allegorical intention of its creator. This description captures a significant aspect of the force exerted by Braque’s papiers collés, Schwitter’s Merz, Heartfield’s photomontaged agitprop, and Warhol’s silkscreened serialization of found imagery. Jarred from their organic context onto an unremitting lateral plane, these constructions signal a reductive uniformity below or beyond art’s representation of life and meaning.

However useful this schema is for the interpretation of a few episodes of twentieth-century art, its binaries fail to register the intent of Mira Burack’s work. What has changed in the meantime? The prevalence of installation-type art may be one reason for this illegibility. At least since the early gallery installations of the mid 1960s, immersion rather than modernist estrangement typifies work that is site-specific and medium-indeterminate. In Burack’s installation, photocollage figures as an element of refamiliarization rather than distancing.

This installation may be described as a non-site. In New York City, we encounter a collaged cipher of New Mexico. The corresponding site is the place the artist inhabits. The passage from the bed to the mountain 30

is given by figural transformations: the comforter upfolds, geologically; the body’s warmth is like that of the sun; qualified by the bin of flower blossoms, the mountain is a heap of petals; laying in the shade of each object is an exercise of attentiveness and care.

The intimate, animated space Burack acknowledges with her installation is unsuited to abstract designation. Instead of heightening the alienation effect, this collection of found objects and handprocessed representations coaxes the high desert tantalizingly near.

Care for self, others, and the shared habitat are aspects of active place-based familiarity. The blackpainted wooden bin once held gravel along the rutted road to the family’s house. The moon is composed of snakeweed plant that the artist’s mother collects in the desert and takes for arthritis. The blanket that circles the sun conveys safety, serenity, and attachment. The thoughtful activism of daily life that Burack practices breaks down hierarchies as she seeks authentic connection to herself, her family, and her place. In this sense, collage—premised on a horizontal process— expresses the same immanence.

This essay was written as part of the Young Art Critics Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICAUSA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which appoints established art critics to serve as mentors for emerging writers. In 2014, CUE joined forces with Art21, combining the Young Art Critic program with the Art21 Magazine Writer-inResidence initiative. Each writer composes a long-form critical essay on one of CUE’s exhibiting artists for publication in CUE’s exhibition catalogue, which is also published by Art21 in its online magazine. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season. For additional arts-related writing, please visit on-verge.org.

Writer John McKissick is a preparator and educator at SITE Santa Fe. His art writing has appeared in Art21 Magazine, Adobe Airstream, and Caldera Culture Review. He curates art and music programming at Radical Abacus, an independent live/work space in Santa Fe’s Industrial Zone.

Mentor Lucy R. Lippard is a writer and activist, author of twenty-four books, most recently Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land Use, Politics, and Art in the Changing West. She lives in Galisteo, New Mexico.

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CUE Art Foundation’s operations and programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, corporations, government agencies, individuals, and its members.

MAJOR PROGRAMMATIC SUPPORT PROVIDED BY ANHOLT SERVICES (USA) INC. // THE GREENWICH COLLECTION, LTD. // CAF AMERICAN DONOR FUND // THE JOAN MITCHELL FOUNDATION // MILTON & SALLY AVERY ARTS FOUNDATION, INC. // AGNES GUND // THE ELIZABETH FIRESTONE GRAHAM FOUNDATION // FOUNDATION FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS // THE NEW YORK COMMUNITY TRUST // NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS, IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE CITY COUNCIL // NEW YORK STATE COUNCIL ON THE ARTS WITH THE SUPPORT OF GOVERNOR ANDREW CUOMO AND THE NEW YORK STATE LEGISLATURE

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CUE 137­WEST 25TH STREET NEW YORK, NY 10001 CUEARTFOUNDATION.ORG

All artwork © Mira Burack. Photography by Eric Swanson.

Catalogue design by Shona Masarin-Hurst

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