EFA STUDIO PROGRAM: Member Artists
M BURGESS
On June 12, 2016, i began to seriously question the impact of Tragedy and Trauma on folks who are already living under the inexorable weight of outstanding difference within cultures that enforce sameness. Responding to the suggestion of a therapist to “paint an emotion,” i first depicted the sounds, energies and sensations that rose up my spine while riding on the back of a friend’s motor bike in Hội An, Vietnam. For 9 years I continued to paint within this field of awareness, often documenting words and images that evolved while painting, and making photographs, videos, sounds and sculptures that also emerged here in Studio 914 m. My activities culminated in the attempt to diagram the creative process - - an undertaking of ineffable complexity. Approaching the 10th anniversary of this work, i seek sponsorship to transform “studio” into an installation/stage, for which i am currently editing a plethora of writings and video documents, while creating performances and planning new audio works.
m is the recipient of numerous grants including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, NYFA, and The Jerome Foundation, with residencies in the United States such as MacDowell, MassMoCa, VCCA and abroad. THEY/THEm has had solo exhibitions in Chelsea and Brooklyn, Texas, and Vietnam and has participated in group exhibitions locally and internationally. With an MFA in sculpture from Yale, in their early years Burgess served as a curator at the Brooklyn Museum, as an assistant to Peter Eisenman, and as a pioneer in the emergence of interactive computer works. After 25 years of teaching, m is currently working as a full-time visual artist. Since June 2016, they have taken a bold turn in their practice, leaving the traditional frameworks and social discourses of their discipline for a solitary expedition into the source of creative flow, by accessing a pre-verbal mind-body state and documenting it.
