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 Georg
Burwick received his B.A. from Pitzer College and his M.F.A from
the University of Chicago where he specialized in site-specific
installation and new media. He has taught studio and art theory
courses in Phoenix and Chicago, and is currently the Curator of
Digital Media at the UCR/California Museum of Photography where he
heads the Museum’s Digital Studio, a community imaging and
technology-learning center.
Burwick
has eleven years of fine and applied arts experience and has
focused on digital video and new media for the past five years.
Currently he is exhibiting his work at La Sierra University
entitle “Cheap New Worlds” through February.
The
underlying principles behind Georg’s work deal with documenting
events from everyday life by reframing these experiences through
varying types of installation. The installations typically
consist of space that employs various aspects of audio and video
manipulation in relation to space, site, and ritual in which
relationships between viewer and “object” are explored. The
“object” is more than merely the material thing that can be seen
or touched; it takes on many forms and can also be a person or
thing toward which an action or feeling is directed. The scenes
represented are familiar, taken from the everyday, and rely on the
preexisting notions and experiences of the viewer to draw his/her
own conclusions from the domestic landscape represented.
MY
PROJECT: Photography by nature, according to Roland Barthes, is
not just a science or a technical apparatus, rather it is a
process of intensions. These intensions taken on through the
process of viewing are to do, undergo, and look. It is through
this interaction taken, by not only the photographer but also the
viewer, that my project is based. In an effort to extend UCR/California
Museum of Photography photographic principles represented not only
in its architecture but also in its collections to the outside
world, the orange on the mall will allow passersby to interact
with it in a similar type of process of intensions. The exterior
of the orange will receive a highly reflective automotive car
paint treatment, allowing the world around it to be reflected on
its surface. Passersby will see themselves distorted on the
surface and change shape as they move closer and further away.
The surface will also produce curiosity through its presence on
the mall and will draw people to inspect it. Embedded in the
surface of the orange will be a viewing area made of Plexiglas,
and a lens and a flat pane of frosted glass will be mounted
inside. The viewers will have to cup their hands to look through
the portal to see the flat plane with an upside down image of the
outside reproduced through the aperture of the lens. Bringing this
camera obscura outside of the museum atmosphere will encourage
viewers to think of the photographic process beyond the museum
context and consider it in terms of a social mechanism.
Artist Picture by: Michael J. Elderman
Orange Picture by:
Carla Conti Bender |
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