Dead Reckoning brings together lens-based works that investigate the paternal side of Erin Elyse Burns’s ancestral heritage. From this position, her work considers how gender, work, immigration, incarnation, and war between nation states inform identity.

From visiting regional archives in the rural North of Ireland where paternal family originates, to navigating the National Archives of England, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, Burns has found the unearthing of information to be both an exercise in fact finding from primary source material and one of engaging with porous myths and untold stories. Time spent in the archives introduces complex inquiry into the gatekeeping of information and the particular barriers required to access historical objects.

In Dead Reckoning, Burns responds to and abstracts this material to consider the archetypal nature of roles played within her family. She uses repetitive physical movements to embody, remember, and release actions her family has performed. These gestures posit that somatic awareness has the ability to relinquish intergenerational trauma. This embodiment questions distinctions of female and male, young and old, past and present. These binaries blend, dissolve, and are interwoven with ideas of the mystical. While the impetus of the work is personal and specific, the content offers viewers a mirror to reflect on their own histories.

Artist Bio

Erin Elyse Burns is a lens-based artist whose practice operates at the intersection of photography, video, and performance. Frequently positioning herself as both subject and author, Burns creates images and time-based works that oscillate between the picturesque, the vulnerable, and the absurd. Preoccupied with the dual role of seeing and being seen, her work probes the tension between distanced scrutiny and inherent intimacy. Themes of identity, ritual, loss, consciousness, and ephemerality recur throughout her practice.

Burns has exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions including the Tucson Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Henry Art Gallery, and the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno. Recent solo exhibitions include SOIL Art Gallery (Seattle, WA), EWU Gallery of Art at Eastern Washington University (Cheney, WA), and Gallery 4Culture (Seattle, WA). Recent group exhibitions include Carnation Contemporary (Portland, OR) and Tlaxcala3 (Mexico City). Her artist residencies include Two Dot Schoolhouse Studios (Montana), Vermont Studio Center, and the Westfjords Residency in northern Iceland. Burns has received grants from 4Culture, the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, and The New Foundation Seattle, and was a Fulbright Arts Finalist. She is an Associate Professor at Cornish College of the Arts at Seattle University.