Christine Burgon

Complaining over the phone about my general uneasiness, Christine points out how important it is to just be bored in one's own home. It is one of those offhand comments that shocks with its simultaneous simplicity and gravity, a sentiment that's equally calming and exciting.

A hallmark of Christine's work, and way of being, is a particular attention to attention. Her sensibility is purposefully sluggish yet razor sharp, with the goal of confounded and ultimately blissful ends. I say before that Christine teaches me how to slow down and absorb the world, and that we have the ability to perceive our own vision and that such attention is an expression of agency. We can choose how to see, and it's okay to enjoy a certain aimlessness or slowness. Sit in a room and let the light change around us while a record spins backwards. Let our thoughts flit back and forth before we inevitably move forward into a brief moment of clarity. Through our plodding a goal may appear, and our subjectivity can become even more fully realized.

In her second solo exhibition in Los Angeles, Christine continues this exploration to more monumental and aggressive ends. Having established her process over the last decade, this shift has enabled a more absorbing and totalizing expansion of her antagonistic grappling between the conscious and the unconscious. Physicality and sight are implied in big gestures, canvases with eyes, architectural and bodily forms, distant landscapes, and with more ground to cover her constant play between shadow and light, cool and warm, foreground and background, thick and thin applications, gentleness and aggression can more fully overwhelm. Binaries and rationality are pummelled from all angles into an ever expanding mass. Tempered with an impoverished good humor—a stamp made from her childhood drawings, a plastic grocery bag dipped in black paint dragged across a surface, discarded string and hot dog buns used as brushes—Christine's dialectical confidence and desperation can be fully felt.

Christine chooses a relatively peaceful life in Duluth, Minnesota and works part time at a local grocery store. Her apartment on a hill overlooks the bay of Lake Superior, and she walks to and from work through a densely wooded trail. A river runs through the trail and circles around it, flattening and pooling here and there enough for bathers. There are boulders large enough to lounge on in the summer. Christine observes the seasons shift throughout the year, noting the slowly freezing water, and the dramatic change in colors as winter undresses the trees before covering it all white. We speak about how important this connection to nature has become to her again—something she doesn't realize she is missing since spending most of her adult life in cities. Christine has found her home. The act of painting forces one to confront the physicality of existence, bestowing an awareness that Christine embraces fully. This exhibition is a testament to her relentless Humanistic pursuit, as well as a reminder of our own personal relationships to the forces pushing and pulling us throughout our lives. Every decisive act arises from a thousand shaken doubts.

—Ramsey Alderson