Pure artist - Jennifer Burkley

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Jennifer Burkley

Jennifer Burkley: Elasticity, protecting myself from myself

Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines elasticity as "a. the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation". Co-mingling the themes of base and carnal instincts and protection/restraint; Burkley presents this new work consisting of polyurethane plastic and rubber scultpures and paintings.

The ideas behind these pieces start with secrets, protective walls, and the horrors of the intimate nuclear family existence. Glossy, slippery, clean things are pleasurable, sexy.

Burkley creates seductions and consternations with images and materials. Venus Dong is a self-portrait made out of a hard, strong plastic -- a pillar of strength. A fragile but resilient rubber sheath (self lubricating) is pulled over it serving as a physical and visual barrier to the impregnating or infecting world outside. The piece becomes a metaphor for the artist quote "protecting myself from myself", with interchangable condom-like sheath dresses,

Drink Indeed alludes to consumption. The piece is a stack of folded body condoms, each slightly different. They appear available for one to unfold, examine, expend.

Aware of the existentialist and phenomenolgoical approaches that feed her creative process, Burkley's process is simultaneously intimate and violent, loving and detached. Lovingly and gently sprinkled dry pigment eats inthe surface of a rubber strip and becomes a visual cut in Pure f Bacon. This cutting alludes to the warm, fluid human body under the cold, distanced surgeon's scalpel. I am compelled by this play of intentionality, and its specific relationships to love, pleasure, destruction and pain. Burkley plays with the extremes of body-ness -- how it effects identity and the outside world, the isolation and subjectiveness of experiences.

Select a thumbnail of a given piece to see it at a fuller size:

View the artist's page.