Their Own Devices

The gallery will host multimedia installations and oil paintings Hedges calls Their Own Devices, made on CNC-routed wood panels, each one cut to house an inexpensive, obsolete consumer device sourced from thrift stores: alarm clocks, blood pressure monitors, stereos, tape recorders, a defibrillator. Figures drawn from real and imagined Renaissance and Baroque sources inhabit panels that are physically interrupted by this hardware, which protrudes from the surface and disrupts the picture plane in both two and three dimensions. The result is both painting and object — a body of work in which the oldest technology of representation is forced into contact with machines that have already outlived their usefulness.

Hedges has spent a decade working at the intersection of oil painting and new media. The painted passages in his work function as images but also as symbols of oil painting itself — its slowness, its complicated history, its physical presence.

“I think of painting as a technology, one of the oldest we have,” Hedges says. “By setting it against its newer counterparts, I want viewers to consider how contemporary technologies are different in both positive and negative ways.”

The exhibition also includes Smart Oven, a large-scale assemblage built around a modified vintage oven. Found speakers, a CRT television, an atomic clock, an audio mixer, wire and plastic shelving, a rubber marine bumper, a jug of water, and a tangle of cords and cables surround an oil and spray paint panel after Hudson River School painter Robert S. Duncanson.

Across both bodies of work, figures partially obscured by or merged with hardware speak to depersonalization, information overload, and the authenticity of expression in an era of disembodied virtual selves. Hedges finds beauty and often a dark comedy in the dissonance between the cold logic of algorithms and the deeply human traditions of painting and other tactile analog tools. Ultimately, the work explores technology as both radical connector and alienating force.

Erin Elyse Burns

Artist Bio

Erin Elyse Burns is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice navigates territory within the disciplines of photography, video, performance art, and artifact. She casts herself as a figure within her work in order to create experiences that evoke a sense of the picturesque, the vulnerable, and the absurd. Preoccupied with being both the seer and being seen by the camera, Burns explores this dual position of power that allows for a dichotomy of distanced scrutiny and inherent intimacy. Concepts of private ritual, loss, identity, and the ephemeral persist within her work. 

Her work has been presented nationally and internationally in exhibitions at Carnation Contemporary in Portland, Oregon, Sarah Spurgeon Gallery at Central Washington University, the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, Border Patrol Gallery in Portland, Maine, the Tucson Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Henry Art Gallery, the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, among others. 

Recent solo and two-person exhibitions have been presented at Lilla Galleriet in Gerlesborg, Sweden, SOIL Art Gallery and the Jack Straw Cultural Center’s New Media Gallery in Seattle. 

Visit her website: https://www.erinelyse.com/