Victor Burgin “Midwest”

Cristin Tierney Gallery

This event has ended.

Cristin Tierney Gallery presents Midwest, an exhibition of recent digital projection works by Victor Burgin that focus on an oft-mythologized
region of the United States. Understood by many to be representative of the larger nation, the Midwest is frequently on the lips and minds of politicians, pundits, and journalists during election cycles. Given the surreal and chaotic presidential politics of 2016, Burgin’s work offers us the opportunity to examine another part of the rich and complicated history of the heartland. This is Burgin’s first solo exhibition in New York since 2005, and he will be present at the reception.

Burgin’s recent work focuses on the way specific architectural sites are
mediated through memory and fantasy; the way “space” becomes “place.”
Using digital tools, he creates verisimilar, hybrid models of image and text that
constitute both a virtual and a psychological portrait of a site. Prairie, for
example, describes the history of “The Mecca” apartment building, built in 1892
and destroyed almost sixty years later when Mies van der Rohe undertook a
redesign and expansion of the Illinois Institute of Design. Combining images
and descriptions of van der Rohe’s Crown Hall with those of former Mecca
residents, Prairie unearths an erased history, revealing the close links between
memory and space.

In Mirror Lake, Burgin contrasts the history of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Seth
Peterson Cottage, located in what is now Mirror Lake State Park, Wisconsin,
with that of the Winnebago culture and tribe, which was forcefully relocated
from that same area to Nebraska in the late 19th century. Burgin’s work
positions such architectural sites as the crystallization of our wishes and fears
about the past, present, and future. The forgotten stories he illuminates,
whether real or imagined, underscore that the built environment is not
an isolated, physical construct, but rather a shifting perception layered with
many different cultural histories.

Victor Burgin first came to prominence in the late 1960s as one of the
originators of Conceptual Art. His work appeared in such key exhibitions as
Harald Szeemann’s Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969)
at the ICA London, and Kynaston McShine’s Information (1970) at The
Museum of Modern Art, New York. Since then, he has had solo exhibitions at
the Museum für Gegenwartkunst Siegen, Kunsthalle Bremerhaven, MAMCO
Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Canadian Centre for Architecture,
Mücsarnok Museum, University at Buffalo Art Gallery, Musée d’art moderne
Villeneuve d’Ascq, The List Visual Arts Center, Renaissance Society at the
University of Chicago, Musée de la Ville de Calais, The Museum of Modern
Art in Oxford, and Stedelijk van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. His work appears
in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The New York Public Library,
The Walker Art Center, The Tate Gallery, The Victoria and Albert Museum, The
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los
Angeles, Museum Ludwig, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Musée national d’art
moderne, Sammlung Falckenberg, and The Arts Council Collection in London.

Burgin graduated from the School of Painting at the Royal College of Art,
London, in 1965, and then went on to study Philosophy and Fine Art at Yale
University School of Art and Architecture, where his teachers included Robert
Morris and Donald Judd. Burgin is Professor Emeritus of History of
Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Emeritus Millard
Chair of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, London. He was recently a Mellon
Fellow and Visiting Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies
at the University of Chicago, where he produced Prairie for the Chicago
Architecture Biennial. He lives and works in Gascony and Paris.