JIM BURTON

Statement

An interest in cultural idioms informs my work. Currently, the dialects, imagery, and other cultural signals I have experienced growing up in the rural South have become my primary rhetoric. Personal experience, family history, and regional attitudes are interpreted and filtered through my own associations and biases, with the hopes of eventually creating iconic scenes out of conflated imagery and ideas. I use cues from this rural culture that I am intensely familiar with, juxtaposed with cues from other cultures with which do not always appear congruent. I discover in working within this sub-sect of society, that the cues - language, perception of time, perception of values, for instance - often have cross-cultural significance.

I invite the viewer into this Southern sub-culture using various means. Sometimes the use of contrived phonetic spellings of colorful Southern phrases, living in an environment that borrows from disparate aesthetic strategies is my method. Or, with the use of unabashedly sentimental images and ideas, I simultaneously revere my memories, while exploiting and highlighting the common interpretations of that culture. I integrate sound and smell, and create a sense of drama along with the visual cues to further this process of immersion. When viewing the work, tenuous and vague narratives begin to take shape, and a personal mythology emerges. With the implicit invitation into my created environments, I am drawing parallels between seemingly incongruent body politics. In my mind, attracting attention to the differences and similarities that the combination of differing cultural symbols suggests is incredibly interesting and relevant. However, while interpretations and implications will naturally vary, political statements are far from my original intent. In no way am I assigning a value judgment to the cultural illustration in any piece. I am merely engaging in a semiotic experiment in the hopes that some underlying meaning will reveal itself; or better yet, that each new piece will force a new set of questions into play, pushing this meta-narrative to new places.

I am, somewhat selfishly, hoping that by the act of making these connections tangible that I can further my understanding of the methods of my own subconscious categorization, which has been my real inspiration for as long as I can remember. I have always been intrigued by social interactive phenomenon in a way that guided all of my actions, not just visual art urges. Why is this image important? Why does the sum of these images mean so much more when they exist in tandem? How am I able to simultaneously feel comfort and disgust at a particular set of cultural signs? Ultimately, I believe that meaning and truth in any concrete sense is elusive...even indefinable...and those ideas will not be discovered as rigid and formed in the Platonic sense. However, as with making art, for me it is the act of creation and consideration that really holds the meaning, not the end result.

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