Victoria Burge “New Editions”
Planthouse
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Planthouse presents Victoria Burge: New Editions, an exhibition featuring four recent editions from 2019 and 2020. Grounded in the structure of the grid and the concept of graphic notation, Burge’s new work explores the ways in which visual codes of line, space, and repetition in everyday contexts constitute an infinitely translatable language.
The drawn or printed lines between points in Burge’s imagery evoke stitched threads, sound waves, and organic forms such as fractured light, cobwebs, and neural pathways. Found diagrams from the 19th and 20th centuries—including maps, weavers’ draft notations, and musical scores—frequently provide a substructure for Burge’s drawings and prints, in which she translates and transforms their data to generate invented patterns.
In Night Architecture, threadlike lines connect scattered points of light on an opaque black ground. Built on the concept of the warp and weft, the vertical and horizontal axes used in weaving, Night Architecture unites Burge’s previous explorations of celestial cartographies with her recent research into the repeat patterns and coded notations used in textile design.
Metric is the graphic trace of a piece of music. Burge converts the notes through several stages of translation—she first makes a drawing, from which a vector image is created. The vector image is then used to produce a laser-cut plate that prints the notes as raised white orbs on a black ground. The resulting image is a systematic arrangement of the visual rhythms and measured cadences found in musical notation.
For Grid Variation I-XX, created with Dieu Donné in Brooklyn, New York, Burge developed a laser-cut mylar stencil of 396 circles within a square grid. Each hand-made paper piece within the edition is composed of a different combination of circles from this stencil. On top of each image, Burge made a unique drawing using pencil, graphite, and opaque inks. The repeated circles’ uniform seriality lends a structured order to the subtle irregularities of the hand-drawn elements.
Composition A and Composition B, printed by Wingate Studio in Hinsdale, New Hampshire, employs the same method of using circles from a grid to generate a pattern, with the points connected geometrically by straight, pencil-thin lines. The pairing of soft-ground etching and sugar-lift in Composition A produces a contrast between the delicate lines and the bold, graphic points. In Composition B, the white points are created by hand-drilling holes in the copper plate so that, when printed, the white of the paper is untouched in those spots.
Victoria Burge’s works are in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the British Museum, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She is a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and has been awarded fellowships by MacDowell and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.
Media
Schedule
from December 03, 2020 to January 17, 2021