David Burrows – Night is also a Sun

David Burrows - Night is also a Sun: G-lbl Hystr-c P-nc J-peg is a challenging exhibition of hand-cut paper cut-outs, mobiles and audio-visual work that addresses viral mutation, propagation, repetition and collapse. A collision between visual styles, the artifice of pictograms and the characteristics of the handmade is staged through mixing the analogue and the digital.

The exhibition has one proposition: ‘Pain is also joy, curse is also a blessing, night is also a sun…’ That is, the sun – an analogy for enlightenment – is eclipsed by the intensity of its after-image, (absolute vision is blind and blinding). The exhibited work draws upon traditional, folk and mass media artifacts such as Halloween silhouettes, Chinese paper cuts and flow diagrams and presents search-engine trash as good fortune charms, sigils and diagrams and symbols of anxiety and aspiration.

Burrows has exhibited extensively in the UK and abroad including the Chisenhale Gallery London, Arts Space Sidney, Museum of Art Marrakesh, Star Space Shanghai, Circulo des Bellas Artes, Madrid and the Mori Art Museum Tokyo. He participated in Macro/Micro: British Art 1996 – 2002, Kunsthalle Mucsarnok, Budapest. In addition to his solo art practice Burrows has often worked in collaboration, including collaborations with the artists’ group BANK, Bob & Roberta Smith and DJ Simpson. Since 2005, David Burrows has been collaborating with Simon O’Sullivan to produce the performance-fiction Plastique Fantastique, which has exhibited or performed at venues that include IMT Gallery London, Akershus Kunstsenter Lillestrom, Alice Day Gallery Brussels,Tate Britain and the Royal Academy of the Arts London. Burrows was selected for Becks Futures at the ICA in 2001 and received a Paul Hamlyn Visual Artists Award in 2003.