Midwest
Spotlight Artist
Elijah Burgher
Midwest
Artist Statement
These large-scale paintings on canvas drop cloths incorporate
ideas from magick and the occult, joined with considerations of
how sexuality and desire may affect the creation of forms. Citing
early twentieth-century occultist Austin Osman Spare’s system,
I draw sigils—emblems encoding specific desires, to which
magical power is imputed. The forms are painted roughly and
quickly, usually with thinned-down acrylic and common paint
rollers, indexing the body’s movement through space. Although
the paintings are artifacts of personal rituals, I have begun
thinking about them as units of a soft architecture—portable walls
and floors with which to alter, partition, or otherwise reimagine
existing spaces.
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