Wednesday Edition: Jason Burch

A Wednesday welcome to you, my collector friends! It's getting to feel like peak season around these parts, and I'm not talking about leaf-peeping. There's a new round of Hey, Hot Shot! open, we're prepping for the gallery's upcoming Nina Berman exhibition and, of course, we're hard at work lining up some primo 20x200 editions, including some intriguing benefit editions with fantastic organizations. My first to-do for today? Presenting this week's photography offering from New Jersey's very own Jason Burch to all of you fine people.

Natural Selections XI and Natural Selections XIII are my selections from Jason's ongoing series by the same name. As he explains it, the series "explores interventions in the landscape and the photographic frame through the withdrawal of information. The process at once removes objects and highlights their presence through that absence."

Jason's work offers a fresh, and often humorous, post-photographic take on many of the themes that are of enduring interest to contemporary artists: juxtapositions of constructed and natural landscapes, humankind's impact on the environment, suburban desolation. His work is challenging; it takes me out of my comfort zone, but because it's conceptual without being impenetrable, and smart without being condescending, it's just the kind of stretch I'm so often looking for.

As is well-documented via my curatorial track record, my instinctive photographic affinities run towards lush landscapes, wordplay and the animal kingdom. I am a fan of beauty, and whether I can live with a piece of art is usually high on my list of evaluative criteria. I'm also someone who is easily bored, and who functions best off in the deep end, figuring things out as I go. Because Jason's work builds upon familiar foundations, it provides a portal into concept-based work that, quite frankly, can often be intimidating. (I like to be challenged, but, like most people, I hate feeling stupid.)

The manipulations of Natural Selections inspire me to make alterations of my own. Seeing how radically his selective exclusions alter perspectives and anthropomorphize the excluded objects makes me want to transform my own environs similarly. Eliminating objects in this way alters things in entirely improbable ways, and yet improbability reveals real things that might be otherwise overlooked. It's a new way of seeing, delineating the aforementioned contemporary themes in an accessible way.

This is the part where I'm like, "Did that make any sense?" Hopefully something in there did, at least a little bit. If not, feel free to enjoy the photos for their aesthetic value — I personally love the color palette, and find the overall effect of the removed portions of the photographs to be reminiscent of coloring books. Those two things alone make them wall-worthy in my book!

That's it for now, but like I said, I'm back tomorrow with a bonus edition. See you then!

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