Ian Burnley: A Bee his burnished Carriage

Artist-in-Residence, Ian Burnley’s exhibition, A Bee his burnished Carriage, features a series of cyanotypes and a two-channel video (originally recorded on 16mm film and presented digitally).

Cyanotype, a 19th-century photographic technique, maintains a strong association with floral life. Burnley’s prints make reference to some of the coded ways that people communicated during the Victorian era when flowers were ascribed hidden and symbolic meanings, allowing for a means to express complex emotions though carefully arranged bouquets. A specific combination of blooms could be gifted to convey a secret message of love or remorse, for example, to the recipient.

Burnley’s video installation, inspired by daytime soap operas, invites viewers to move through the space, much as a pollinator might vacillate between blossoms. Soap operas present expansive, self-perpetuating stories in which beloved characters navigate complex, often absurd, plotlines. Within Burnley’s piece, a series of vignettes play out across two screens, as fictional characters project their emotions onto objects. These objects, in turn, become stand-ins for human passion.

The subject matter of both the cyanotypes (flowers) and the film (soap operas) occupy similar niches within the seemingly incompatible landscapes of the natural world and daytime television. As Burnley explains, “flowers serve as a kind of ‘living advertisement’ to a variety of animal life, much as soap operas have historically functioned to seduce the attention of consumers.”