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Exhibit at the Northeast Harbor Public Library

Today we hung the exhibit and tomorrow we open for the month of April at the Northeast Harbor Public Library on Mt. Desert Island, Maine. This will represent my US debut, and I’m excited. It’s an excellent location for exposure to a great community. Galleries and museums are nice, but the location is often just as important, and in this town the library is probably just as valuable, maybe more so. There’s just a few more tweaks to do tomorrow afternoon before we officially open, but fingers are crossed that all goes well, and not just for tomorrow but for

March 31, 2017

Zaratan Residency: The Final Weekend

So here we are, the final weekend of my Zaratan residency. When I first arrived I had a lot of plans, some expectations, and at the same no idea what I was going to produce. I had spoken with the gallery before arriving about possibly exhibiting the last week of the residency, but due to their schedule and, quite frankly, my lack of time to create and frame everything properly, they said no. This motivated me to only focus on making art. Actually, I had another motivation: fear. We put all my art – my entire studio, essentially, with

January 26, 2017

Zaratan Open Studio

My Zaratan open studio starts Friday, Jan 27 at 7pm to 10pm and goes until Sunday, Jan 29. The open studio is upstairs from the gallery in the residents’ quarters. I will show the studies that I created during my residency period. At the same time, I will show a work-in-progress sculpture using beer cans and a collaborative video with fellow resident Daniel Gawronski. Admission is free. This comes after my artist talk, which you can see here. All pieces are for sale, including a limited-edition run of a Risograph. I created the Risograph at the request of the

January 25, 2017

Novo-Surrealism Artist Talk at Zaratan

This video is of the Novo-Surrealism artist talk I gave in January, 2017 at Zaratan Arte Contemporanea in Lisbon, Portugal. The topic was Novo-Surrealism and the Media’s Message versus the Audience’s Understanding of Reality. About 10 people attended live and about 200 people attended on the live broadcast on FB Live. The discussion lasted about an hour. It covered the theory, possible avenues the project can take going forward, and how open the idea can become. I was a bit nervous, as I had not given a serious artist talk like this before. In the end, however, I knew

January 14, 2017

Collaboration: Zaratan by Greg Mason Burns and Daniel Gawronski

I recently did a residency in Lisbon, Portugal and while there I met the other artist-in-residence, Daniel Gawronski. Daniel is an Australian artist who works primarily with sound art. His method is interesting in that he takes images from the natural environment and uses those to map musical compositions. We both attended the residency at Zaratan Arte Contemporanea in Lisbon, but this collaboration was an accident. For the audio, Gawronski used a photograph of trees from a forest Sintra, Portugal, outside Lisbon, to create a music scale. Trees that were close represented low notes and trees that were in

January 12, 2017

Redefining The Surreal (Novo-Surrealism)

While some of my work may have a hint of Surrealism in it, I am not a Surrealist by definition. And yet I feel as if I am a Surrealist in spirit and maybe by nature as well. To start, I care nothing of dreams and the contradiction between them and real life. This, shown with great realism, is the definition of Surrealism. However, there is a deeper meaning to Surrealism, and if André Breton was right in that Surrealism was a revolutionary movement then I certainly fit in. I do so via approach as opposed to what the painting

April 25, 2016

Greg Mason Burns