What might be

source: artutseduau

Ian Burns was born in Newcastle, NSW in 1964. Internationally recognised, he has held solo exhibitions in Dublin, Vienna, St. Louis, New York, Melbourne, Hobart, Paris and Madrid. Recent group exhibitions include Dark Heart 2014 Adelaide Biennale, In the Telling, ACMI, Melbourne, the Liege Biennial in Belgium (2012), the Anne Landa Award at the AGNSW (2011) and Housebroken at the Flux Factory, New York (2010). His work is included in public collections, including the Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main; the MCA, Sydney; the Berge Collection, Spain; the Chartwell Collection, Auckland; and the 21C Museum, Louisville, Kentucky. He is a current recipient of a Queensland College of Art, Griffith University Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship and is represented by Anna Schwartz Gallery and mother’s tankstation, Dublin.
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source: spencerbrownstonegallery

Ian Burns’ kinetic dioramas and video feed works have engaged with subjects as diverse as the war in Iraq, TV culture, colonialism, and art history. Using plain wood and primitive electronics, and often incorporating household objects and other assorted junk, Burns creates absurdly convoluted mechanisms whose purpose is to produce a simple moving image on a screen, either by live video fed to a monitor, or as a shadow theater-like diorama.

Fascinating and darkly humorous, Burns’ works directly explore the gap between how images are constructed and how they are consumed. His sublime video landscapes, constituted by the objectifying eye of a camera lens, often turn out to be mere chimera conjured by the instrumentalizing forces of global capitalism. Regular activities such as driving through the city at night are rendered absurd, mythologized beyond hope by the cinematic narratives from which we are powerless to extricate ourselves.

By focusing on the ubiquity of the screen and our ever-more sedentary relationship to it, Burns’ work offers a brilliantly clear-sighted dissection of the mediated image and it’s role in propagating the fear, paranoia and paralysis of our post 9/11 world. Nevertheless, the artist’s gleefully disrespectful approach to new technology leavens this ‘message’ with humor – his unique melding of the hi-tech and the handcrafted is ultimately a bravura demonstration of the transformative power of art.