Jan Burleson: Things Pile Up

September 2 – October 1, 2022
Jan Burleson: Things Pile Up
Opening reception: Friday, September 2, 5:00-9:00 PM
Gallery hours: Monday-Friday, 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM and Saturday, 10:00 AM – 1:00 PM.

Things Pile Up…all things visible and invisible. The pandemic year was extraordinary in its spectrum of ruptures: the human spirit struggled under the weight of death and burgeoning cultural and systemic fractures. During the haunting disruption and isolation of the year, I found good use for the many magazines that had long piled up in our home spaces. My work is both deconstructive and reconstructive—here, of torn society. I have used cut and torn images from those accumulated magazines, now history pieces in themselves, in collage as exploratory process, gleaning slivers of culture and halted experience, borrowing color, content and shape, sometimes including direct art historical references, to create pilings of redesigned matter, things stacking up, collaborations of opposites, painting sturdiness in the face of great constraint. I paint arrangements of those fragments, creating lively, precarious balances of chaos and order, unifying fragility and stability. The color is enlivened, vibrant, sometimes jazzy, intended to be transformative.

Jan Burleson fulfilled a wish for formal art education after 30 years of professional life as a clinical social worker, both in public mental health and private practice. She completed her BFA in Painting and Drawing at UT-Chattanooga in 2016, and at present works primarily with oil and collage. She received a 2019 Bailey Opportunity Grant and was selected for Chattanooga’s Association for Visual Arts’s 2015 FRESH Young and Emerging Artists Exhibit. Her work has been exhibited regionally in the National Juried Exhibition, Dogwood Arts’s Regional Fine Art exhibitions, McGhee Tyson’s Arts in the Airport, Chattanooga’s Association for Visual Arts, Positive-Negative 27, 32, and 37 at East Tennessee State University’s Slocumb Gallery, in CHA-Art-Space at Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport, and at the Arts Center in Athens.

Share this:

Related