Mollie Burke

Statement

I explore materiality to question the relationship between entropy and order. I am interested in the way experience and knowledge is mediated through tools of understanding the undetectable – screens, telescopes, microscopes, X rays. How are is the unseen made visible through these devices, and what can it reveal about the limits of our perception? My work references the “Gods eye view” of scientific imagery such as microscopic slides of ocean plastics and aerial views of landscape designs as methods of exposing and critiquing the dominant forms of understanding and approaching the human “other”. To challenge the particular processes of relating to the natural world, my work intentionally sits in a dialectical space, holding the tensions of many opposites – digital/physical, nature/culture, hard/soft, self/other. I call this “dissonant aesthetics”, a term that describes my approach to collage and assemblage, where I oscillate between chance events and ordered process to capture these multiple tensions. By referencing and mixing histories of expressionist and hard edged painting with the poetics of light and space, I want my work to provide a mapping of embodied affect along with entangled modes of perceiving.

GlogauAIR Project

This project will document my interaction with the urban environment of Berlin, filtered through my interest in the relationship between order and entropy. The history of modernism in Berlin combined with the reclaiming of public spaces by grafiti and industrial decay are sites that I will study through sketches, material salvaging, and photography. I am interested in the decaying nature of industrial sites, as well as the way memory and politics are embedded in the architecture and planning of the city. I will collect detritus and create soft sculptures with varying levels of opacity and transparency that will house found objects along with my own painterly interventions. As I work at the intersection of sculpture and painting, these pieces will balance painterly considerations of composition, colour, and optics, along with the sculptural concerns of weight and gravity. In this work studying the city, I want to explore the inherent tension of being a consuming body in an urban environment, while being hyper aware of this consumption as a destructive force in the context of a climate emergency. I will examine how the body interacts and moves as a result of the civic infrastructure, and sites where the order and design of the city turns into entropy and decay.

Installation, Painting, and Sculpture

CV Summary

Mollie holds a BA from McGill University in art history and cultural studies, a diploma of fine art from Langara College, and a Masters of Fine Art from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She was awarded the Bill Watson award for excellence in printmaking, the Barbara and Arne Vengshoel scholarship for excellence in visual arts, and the SSHRC graduate scholarship. In 2021 she completed residencies at Griffin Art projects and Material Matters design research lab. She is a board member at Unit/Pitt in Vancouver and teaches sessional courses at Emily Carr University of Art and Design.

Gallery