Canadian artist Bill Burns’s recent opus “Dogs and Boats and Airplanes” represents a profound immersion in the iconography of travel and the sophisticated commercial industry which enables it. The project is both multi-sensorial in its...
moreCanadian artist Bill Burns’s recent opus “Dogs and Boats and Airplanes” represents a profound immersion in the iconography of travel and the sophisticated commercial industry which enables it. The project is both multi-sensorial in its focus on object inter- actions, and interdisciplinary in that it engages cinematic appropriation, quotidian social phenomena, and commu- nity participation. Comprised of drawings, a photographic series, a photo book, a postcard book, a collection of salt and pepper shakers, a vinyl album, a video and a print series, this heterogeneous body of work has been widely exhibited during various stages of development though it has yet to be presented together in its entirety. In effect, “Dogs and Boats and Airplanes” engages with animal and mechanical interactions in the post-industrial world largely by way of tactile, relational, and sonic encounters. Burns’s preoccupation with a central theme – in this case, dogs, boats, and airplanes – and dili- gent accumulation of images and objects pays homage to Dadaist strategies of incongruence and absurdity to question how seemingly unrelated elements cultivate new aesthetic vocabularies.
