David Burrows
David Burrows works primarily in sculpture and photography. His large-scale photographs present staged aftermaths and scenes of excess or disaster made in the artist’s studio. His sculpture and floor installations are cut from foam, vinyl, rubber and paper and explore similar scenes and concerns to the photographs. With a seductive Pop-like aesthetic the artist presents scenarios that manage to be both horrific and hilarious.
His work is fraught with complex potential interpretation and intimations of violence and hysterical imaginings. And yet they are pleasing in their brightly saturated colours and skilful placement and manipulation of material. All that is missing from the scenarios he makes are the human beings, the agents or victims of the destruction and excess we witness. His painstakingly composed, shredded, sliced, exploded, tattered and fragmented everyday objects construct fake indices of one or two brief moments of violence or excess.
“Shattered (Blue Mirror)” is unique in David Burrows’ practice as it was his first work to combine his dual concerns of the photographic and the sculptural. In this piece the reflection of an aftermath is caught behind the carefully cut lattice-work of a shattered surface, held in a blue rubber frame. The photograph becomes an object, a shattered mirror reflecting a scene.
