August 2022 / In the Backspace: The Constable

In the Backspace /

The Constable by Erin Elyse Burns

August 04 – 27, 2022
Opening Reception / Thursday, August 04, 5–8pm

Summer/Covid-19 Gallery Hours:
Friday–Sunday, 12–5pm

The Constable is the first installment of Ancestors, which is an ongoing project. Ancestors engages with open-ended questions around familial identity, work, and class. 

What does it mean to inherit intergenerational trauma? 
Can we humans ever escape how we are made? 
How does our work influence and constrain who we are? 

The Constable began with awareness that there are at least four generations of military men in my family. This patrilineal inheritance runs through my blood. I come from a long line of those who policed the behavior of others. There is violence in this knowing. Myth, fractured stories diluted across generations, conjuring, and imagination intermingle. More archetype than autobiography, The Constable embodies my physical presence as a Royal Irish Constabulary officer, which was the police force of Ireland before the boundaries of North and the Republic existed. Female and male, young and old: these binaries dissolve amidst visions of smoke, rubble, and ruins. The past and the present are interwoven with the mystical. The gallery floor acts as a reflecting pool while I march through time, space, and the family line. 

ARTIST BIO /

Erin Elyse Burns is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice navigates territory within the disciplines of photography, video, performance art, and artifact. She casts herself as a figure within her work in order to create experiences that evoke a sense of the picturesque, the vulnerable, and the absurd. Preoccupied with being both the seer and being seen by the camera, Burns explores this dual position of power that allows for a dichotomy of distanced scrutiny and inherent intimacy. Concepts of private ritual, loss, identity, physicality, and the ephemeral persist within her work. 

Her work has been exhibited at the Tucson Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Henry Art Gallery, and the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno. Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at the Jack Straw Cultural Center’s New Media Gallery in Seattle and at Lilla Galleriet in Gerlesborg, Sweden. She has attended the Vermont Studio Center residency and the Westfjords Residency in northern Iceland. Her work has been awarded grants from 4Culture, the Office of Arts & Culture, Seattle, The New Foundation Seattle, and she was a Fulbright Arts Finalist. She is a member of the artist collective SOIL Art Gallery, holds an MFA from the University of Washington, and a BFA from the University of Nevada. She is an Associate Professor in the Art Department at Cornish College of the Arts.

Erin Elyse Burns, The Constable
Video Still
Dimensions variable
2022

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