Mark Burns

Lives in Las Vegas, Nevada (2008)Mark Burns was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1950, and initially studied illustration at the School of Dayton Art Institute. Continuing his graduate studies in ceramics at the University of Washington under Patti Warashina and Howard Kottler, Burns began to produce the figurative tableau and sculptural teapots on which his reputation is based.Burns' sculptures are constructed from found, cast and modeled components, then glazed, left unglazed, or painted (most recently with china paints) and combined with diverse materials -- plastic, metal, electric light, wood, decals, and photographs. In scale, his work has embraced a small cup to large environments of sculptures with painted plinths and walls. Like Kenneth Price's Mexican curio displays, these environments cease being objects and become perceptual fields.Burns' constructions are full of allusions to love and pain -- raging fires, thorns, razor blades, broken shards, blood, and martyred saints. Bodily forms are twisted and warped as in comic strips. Jesters and Harlequins, horror movied monsters and sci-fi fantasies, fifties social mythologies are transformed by Burns into characters racked by solid anxiety.For all situational angst, Burns' sculptures are cooly manufactured with sleek surfaces and scant true expressionistic handling. There is little of the rough surfaces of Arnold Zimmerman or Kirk mangus. Burns telegraphs his illustrative sculptures from the interior of his soul, signaling that expressionism, as historically understood, is just a genre, a style.Burns' sculptures, directly (through psersonal reference) or indirectly (through cultural reference_, examine the role of the Other. The gay subculture, the art of the outsider (How Psychotics Paint, 1987, pays homage to the insane cat illustrator Louis Wain), the suburban ornamentation of fifties-style homes, the low culture of leather bikers and tattoo parlores, the comic sadism of Tex Avery's animated cartoons are catalogue in Burns' vision.REFERENCE: Burns, Frimkiss, Makins: Contrast and Continuum, exhibition catalogue (The University of the Arts, Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Ceramic Consortium, 1992)