SCATTERED LIMBS showcases a body of work Burr has been developing since 2020: a visual exploration of technology’s monumental effect on humans. It includes a collection of monochrome lithographs, a series of multi-layered UV prints, and generative software. Taken as a whole, the work pictoralizes a digital ecosystem where social connections are optimized, abstracted, commodified, and surveilled. Graphically simplified human figures are forcefully woven into a complex multi-level 2D matrix, offering scenes of spent bodies conforming to the binary logic of a modernist grid.
Widely recognized as a digital artist, Burr’s recent work includes an online commission from the Whitney Museum of American Art, a web3 collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, and numerous pieces using tools from the video game industry to create immersive cinematic experiences. SCATTERED LIMBS finds him on terra firma, with a gallery-based installation of experimentally-processed prints in addition to generative screen-based work created in collaboration with Dave Tandem.
Burr’s playful experimentation with multiple scales of the human body invites viewers to identify alternately with the figures that are iconically enlarged and put on display, and with the small crowds that blithely gather to celebrate the abstract spectacle. Sources for the rigid environments comprising the world of these works can be found in industry and technology: integrated circuits, television test patterns, and malfunctioning digital user interfaces. Burr also draws deeply from a history of utopian dreaming in modern art including the paper architecture of Superstudio and Archigram, constructivist monuments from the early 20th century Soviet empire, and the cool restraint of American minimalism. The visual effect of these white-on-black grids can be hard and synthetic, but Burr’s aims are gentle and human: to foster empathy for those flat bodies trapped within them and to consider how far we want to go on this accelerating journey towards our digital future.
Top image: SCATTERED LIMBS, UV print on acrylic, 42 x 84 inches
Bottom image: OPTIONAL PLAQUE (DISMANTLES EASILY WHEN THE TIDES TURN), UV print on acrylic, 7 1/2 x 15 inches
