Sky Burchard
Artists Sky Burchard |
About Sky Burchard, All Year Round Falling in Love @ CIRCUS GALLERY Opening reception Saturday, February 28th 7-9PM February 28 – April 4, 2009 We are pleased to present Sky Burchard’s, All Year Round Falling In Love, in this, his first solo show with Circus Gallery. With his signature style of hard edge foam sculptures, Burchard uses the background elements from a single level of the video game, Super Mario World, to meld contemporary life with a Cyber aesthetic. The sculptures and wall work in this show explore the possibilities of taking the sparseness of an 8 and 16-bit video game and expanding that to a fully realized collection of emotionally charged works. Burchard meticulously carves the foam material into the bricks and spikes of a digitized form; painstakingly painting each element to render them a precise scaled replica of the video game. Depending on the particular piece, spikes jut outward or inward from the blocks, suggesting a kind of metaphoric defense mechanism for either the sculpture or sculptor. In a world where Avatars are a substitute for a person’s “real” social life on simulation sites like Second Life or even Facebook, Burchard’s work could not be more relevant. Sky sees his work as the expression of repression, a statement on the desensitization that can result from obsessive behavior. He constructs a made-up world using foam, plastics and spray paint with razor precision in much the same way that the old masters carved idyllic marble statues. For Sky, it is that same unrealistic obsession that is the catalyst by which his heightened, super reality is achieved. The sculptures are at the same time anthropomorphic and abstract depictions of that ‘reality.’ Sky Burchard was born in Los Angeles in 1977. He received his MFA from USC in 2002 and a BFA from UCLA in 2000. As a youth he was active in the Los Angeles graffiti movement. Burchard has shown in Japan as well as extensively showing throughout LA as Black Dragon Society, The Smell, Raid Projects and Yotaka Sone’s Backyard. In 2006 Sky had a solo show at Dangerous Curve in Los Angeles. |