TRANSCRIBING THE ELEMENTS

TRANSCRIBING THE ELEMENTS
BY BOBBIE BURGERS
I hope the viewer feels thrown off, I hope the viewer feels welcomed by beauty and the natural, as a welcome mat into uncomfortable instability.

-Bobbie Burgers
Tayloe Piggott Gallery is pleased to present Transcribing the Elements, an exhibition of work by artist Bobbie Burgers, on view from February 18^th through March 27^th, 2022. This solo exhibition, her first with Tayloe Piggott Gallery, brings together a vast multitude of media, sculpture, paintings and works on paper, each displaying the artist’s technical ease and exploratory nature. Works on paper reveal themselves to be collaged with woodblock prints and etchings; oil bars and soft pastels are manipulated to look like liquid paint. Sprayed acrylic ‘spray paint’ mimics pastels and brushstrokes mimic collage. “I hope the viewer feels thrown off, I hope the viewer feels welcomed by beauty and the natural, as a welcome mat into uncomfortable instability,” the artist says.
Bobbie Burgers is a Canadian artist fascinated with the process of decay, transformation, and metamorphosis. With a distinct style that merges abstraction with representation in increasing degrees, her work brings together instinctive compositions while revealing her precise powers of observation. Remarkable for their compositional rhythms, bold coloration, and sweeping gestural brushstrokes, Burgers’ paintings bring alive the fundamental quest to express something personal, subjective and emotive, in a poetic, abstract way.
An excerpt from her artist’s statement reads: “When I first started to paint ‘still lifes’ it felt very static, like there was one moment that would be preserved. If there is anything I have learned as a mother, daughter, wife, divorcee, sister, friend, nothing is ever static. I slowly broke down everything I thought was right, to find beauty in the ever-changing. Light shifts constantly, day to night to day, and I began to see my bouquets that were just there as color inspiration as a total metaphor for our personalities. These were not passive, domesticated, contained. They became emblems of perseverance—change—and as this idea took hold it became more and more clear that these simple flowers were a minor feminist rebel symbol.”
From freestanding, wildly innovative sculptures to splashy acrylic canvases, the exhibition showcases Burgers’ breadth as an artist. Her work builds in energetic brush work, sometimes to a frenzy, while maintaining a balanced quietude in veiled washes and open space. The viewer is rewarded again and again with a closer investigation. The canvases are in fact punctuated with thoughtful collage elements. The freestanding sculptures are tree-like and painterly, formed with plaster and brightly pigmented paper towering over elegant marble bases. A trio of framed works on paper, titled Performance Art #1, #2 and #3, incorporate myriad media: woodblock print elements, collage elements, oil bar, acrylic, pastel, and spray paint.
Born in 1973 in Vancouver, Canada, Bobbie Burgers studied art history at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. The artist has been given solo exhibitions throughout North America and exhibited her work around the world, most recently The Hard Work of Spring, a critically acclaimed museum exhibition at the West Vancouver Art Museum. Five of the works in this exhibition have traveled directly from the museum exhibition. Today, her works are in the collections of the Berost Corporation in Toronto and the Royal Bank of Canada, among others. Burgers lives and works in Vancouver, Canada.