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Sky Burchard
All Year Round Falling in LoveCircus Gallery
7065 Lexington Avenue, Los Angeles
(323) 962-8506 www.circus-gallery.com
All Year Round Falling in Love
Sky Burchard, All Year Round Falling in Love, 2009, installation view. Courtesy artist and Circus Gallery.
What happens to unrequited video-game love? Does it disintegrate within the matrix? Or does it defeat the villain and rescue the princess? With Nintendo's Super Mario World at its abstract core, Sky Burchard's exhibition brought up these questions, like a long-gone romance you can't forget, through a self-deprecating nostalgia for 8- and 16-bit video games.
In the main gallery, the synergy created by Burchard's sculptures both revealed and repelled the viewer with abstract tales of isolation and unshakeable teenage angst in late adulthood. Burchard's exact-scale replicas of characters and landscapes from Super Mario World are rendered in foam with painstaking precision and are meticulously hand-painted. They suggest the difficulty of obtaining and maintaining human relationships and our perpetual struggle with vulnerability and exposure. Constructed of unnatural materials with hard edges that jut outward or seal off their interiors from sight with a formidable shyness, Burchard's projection of a two-dimensional system into the third dimension gives his sculptures a disconcerting approachability and sympathy, despite their imposing spikes and obsessive precision.
In the small gallery, rapidly fabricated but exquisite maquettes were displayed on individual shelves. Unsullied by contact, these maquettes were set atop pristine white blocks of foam and held in quasi-scientific suspense under Plexiglas. Their sole companions were Burchard's original framed drawings, whose anthropomorphic names -- Intensity, Avoidance, Isolation, Solitude -- suggest the deeper emotional implications hidden within the larger sculptures.
Between the two rooms, Burchard took the viewer inside and out and back again. Irresistible works that seemed to ward off the viewer simultaneously begged for contact. There is danger in Burchard's beautiful game -- much like the game mechanics of life itself.
In the main gallery, the synergy created by Burchard's sculptures both revealed and repelled the viewer with abstract tales of isolation and unshakeable teenage angst in late adulthood. Burchard's exact-scale replicas of characters and landscapes from Super Mario World are rendered in foam with painstaking precision and are meticulously hand-painted. They suggest the difficulty of obtaining and maintaining human relationships and our perpetual struggle with vulnerability and exposure. Constructed of unnatural materials with hard edges that jut outward or seal off their interiors from sight with a formidable shyness, Burchard's projection of a two-dimensional system into the third dimension gives his sculptures a disconcerting approachability and sympathy, despite their imposing spikes and obsessive precision.
In the small gallery, rapidly fabricated but exquisite maquettes were displayed on individual shelves. Unsullied by contact, these maquettes were set atop pristine white blocks of foam and held in quasi-scientific suspense under Plexiglas. Their sole companions were Burchard's original framed drawings, whose anthropomorphic names -- Intensity, Avoidance, Isolation, Solitude -- suggest the deeper emotional implications hidden within the larger sculptures.
Between the two rooms, Burchard took the viewer inside and out and back again. Irresistible works that seemed to ward off the viewer simultaneously begged for contact. There is danger in Burchard's beautiful game -- much like the game mechanics of life itself.