Spotlight Artist

Angela Burson

South
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Featured in New American Paintings

Artist Statement

 Throughout my career I have been influenced by anachronistic images of fashion and personal objects. My paintings and needlepoint works recontextualize outmoded styles and give them new meanings. I paint images of often headless people, their personal objects and interior spaces that indicate complex psychological and social relationships with one another. Without the head, the viewer sees the clothed body not as a portrait but as a collection of objects, and patterns. I am interested in the surreal connection between realistic subject matter and flat repetitive pattern. Often the objects, personages, or fragments of a body are culled from existing family photographs. Shirts as conjoined twins, empty suits, bandaged arms, headless torsos, a suitcase, a toy boat, an empty room—all are employed as signifiers, providing glimpses into the complexities of identity and the possibilities that exist in relationships between objects. The subtlety of the closely rendered detail is intended to provide the viewer insight into layers of meaning.

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