"Burn: Artists Play with Fire"
2001-07-07 until 2001-09-23
Columbia Museum of Art
Columbia, SC, USA

An exhibition of contemporary art, Burn: Artists Play with Fire examines a cross section of artists who create works containing such elements of fire as smoke, ash and flame. Burn brings together both strongly emerging and established contemporary artists working with traditional and non-traditional materials and processes. It explores the mystical magnetic attraction that fire holds. Artists incorporate fire, smoke, and/or ash in their art and work in many media – conceptual art, video, painting, sculpture, photography and photo-documentation of site-specific performance art.

Technique and theme merge in these dramatic works as artists explore such issues as cultural identity, environmental fragility and personal loss. Some of the featured artists include L.C. Armstrong, Chris Burden, John Cage, Willie Cole, Kathleen Kucka, Leslie Lerner, Ana Mendieta, David Nash, Conrad Marca-Relli, Dennis Oppenheim and George Stoll. These artists utilize a breadth of techniques and mediums, from Ana Mendieta’s haunting photographs that silhouette her body in ash and flame to the ominous charred wood sculptures of David Nash to Willie Cole's resonant scorched images on canvas using a common household iron.

This exhibition is organized by the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, and is generously funded, in part, through the Neuberger Berman, LLC Fund at the New York Community Trust with additional support from the Norton Museum’s Michael Rea Endowment for Special Exhibitions. Free Times is the local media sponsor.

IMAGE:
Thomas Kettner, Jr.
Dante's Inferno: Suicides, 1982
magnifying glass and sun on paper

Related Links:

Indepth Arts Resources for the State of South Carolina

Other Important Exhibitions in United States