Gary Burnley
I am interested in how we view others as well as ourselves.
Personal history and memory play a meaningful role in shaping visual cognizance. But ambiguity and factors that may seem at odds with our perception serve an equally important role by amplifying the relationship between incongruous assessment and experiential convictions.
Contradiction, of vernacular, of predisposed narratives, of generally accepted associations the viewer might bring to any image has a way of escorting interpretation to places where solutions are not fixed, quick nor simple.
I mean the word contradiction here as in paradox, in the way one speaks of color, where an opposite is not really opposite but a necessary component to complete, more fully understand and make an experience whole. A compliment. Like how adding red to the palette enables one to see differently, see in a way using green on its own could not.
Imagine a high school yearbook photo from the 1970’s of a Black male seen alongside a stately 17th Century portrait painting of a young Spanish heir to the throne. The images reference different centuries, cultures and positions in life. They are composed differently, constructed of different materials, produced for seemingly opposing reasons and purposes. The images appear to be unrelated, to have little in common, to commemorate and memorialize divergent paths in life and moments in time.
However disparate the reading of those images may be, both maintain an aspirational message and feel, in nature and function. The images are a mirror into who these young men are or were, who they wished to become, how they might have liked to be seen and would have hoped to be remembered. When one imagines them together, coerced to cohabitate, existing face-to-face, sharing time and place, the most obvious differences become conflated, are no longer so pronounced or necessarily a point of entry. Façades of dissonance still contradict but in doing so also illuminate significant similarities. Both images could be appreciated, could be understood and seen, despite discords, as very much the same.
It is this duplexity I want the viewer to be apprised of, to puzzle out the consequences of. When you look at those two images, what is do you see and what do you not? What is present and what is absent? Why? Gained? Lost? Validated or invalidated? Amplified, unfastened?
Does any of it matter?
Stereotypes have built-in conflicts. The root of the word stereos in Greek translates to mean solid, the root of the word type refers to the impression of something. How we conjure another should not be fixed nor solid, but instead, translucent and reflective.