Opening Reception Saturday 6 August 3 – 5pm

The Butler Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition by Ian Burns, an internationally renowned New York based Australian artist, who studied both as an engineer and an artist.

Burns’s sculptures and installations investigate the expectations of art viewing with wry humour and audience engaging invention. Referencing high and low culture with equal zeal they produce events, displays and cinema via everyday household objects. Burns brings the power cables out from behind the couch and combines them with the fluff of the 6pm news into an aesthetic whole, creating systems reflective of the anthropological mayhem born of globalization, technological seductions and ideas of what constitutes good taste in kitchenware. Burns’s works elicit unforgettable images that blur the boundaries between hope and negation, laughter and frustration.

Ian Burns has exhibited extensively and has had solo exhibitions in the USA, Australia, Spain, Ireland and Austria. His work is included in major public collections including the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, 21C Museum, Kentucky, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and The National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, as well as many important private collections such as the Jumex Collection, Mexico, and the Berge Collection, Spain. He is represented by mother’s tankstation.

Burns received a PhD from Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia in 2008, an MFA from Hunter College of CUNY, New York in 2003, a BFA from The University of Newcastle, Australia in 1989 and a BEng from Swinburne University, Melbourne, Australia in 1989.

With thanks to the Arts Council for essential annual funding and to the OPW, FÁS, The Heritage Council and Kilkenny Local Authorities for additional assistance.

Artist Talk: Tuesday August 9^th, 1-2pm

www.ianburns.net