The 1999 Anne & Gordon Samstag
International Visual Arts Scholarships
| Paul Hoban | Hanh Ngo | Deborah Paauwe | Matthew Warren |
Artist: KRISTIAN BURFORD
12:17 pm:Melissa 1998
fibreglass, timber and fittings
250 x 250 x 340 cm
© the artist
12:17 pm:Melissa (detail) 1998
fibreglass, timber and fittings
250 x 250 x 340 cm
© the artist
In eyes of the precocious Kristian Burford, the Big Apple still looks like the centre of the artistic universe - well, at least his artistic universe which feeds on sculptural hyper-realism and urban decadence, and which is cosmologically constructed around fictive and poetic excess.
Perhaps mindful of New York's Robert Gober and Eric Fischl, Burford's cunningly orchestrated mise en scene punctures our mundane reality with charged psycho-sexual taboo, the sort that easily conforms itself to a Lacanian analysis of soft porn literature or film. But worry not, 12:17 Melissa... is a user-friendly installation that monumentalizes the orgasmic, self-feeding female body as an ordinary prop of mod living and allows just enough theory and perversity of subject/object relations to keep the author, protagonist and viewer on the edge.
M.A. Greenstein
from her Samstag catalogue essay;
Back to the Future - From Wry to Rave
| Kristian Burford Born 1974, Adelaide, South Australia |
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| 1999 | Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship MFA, Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles, USA |
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| 1996 | Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours), South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia, Adelaide |
| Paul Hoban | Hanh Ngo | Deborah Paauwe | Matthew Warren |