Jack Burman
(Ontario, Canada)
The Dead
Since the mid-1980s, Jack Burman has been visiting concentration camps, medical laboratories, churches, and catacombs around the world looking for the dead who are still present among the living. With irreproachable sensitivity and respect, he takes very detailed photographs of cadavers, skeletons, and limbs and heads floating in formaldehyde. The Dead (1999-2010) depicts, of course, a raw and tragic subject that does not allow our vision of death to remain abstract. However, the aesthetic applied to these post-mortem bodies acts here as an invitation to discover the sensuality of the body and to approach, with confidence, the fine line linking life to death.
Born in 1949 in Hamilton, Ontario, Jack Burman lives and works in Toronto. In 2010, the Magenta Foundation published the first collection from these years of research, The Dead. His photographs have been exhibited numerous times in Canada and abroad, including at the Centre VU in Quebec City (1999), the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottawa (2000–2001), the Prairie Art Gallery, in Grande Prairie, Alberta (2004), the Warsaw Palace of Culture (2003), the Gallery TPW in Toronto (2007), and the Clint Roenisch Gallery which represents him in Toronto (2010).
ARSENAL
2020 William (corner of Canning and Notre-Dame W.) | 438 402 4975
Sept 8 – Oct 9, 2011 | Wednesday 12 pm to 6 pm, Thursday 12 pm to 7 pm, Friday to Sunday 12 pm to 6 pm
Opening – Thursday Sept 8, 2011 at 6 pm (meet the artist)