Benrimon Contemporary is pleased to announce From the Land of Pleasant Living, Amanda Burnham’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, which will feature a drawing installation with related works on paper.

Burnham creates drawings and installations based on American urban landscapes. Starting from observational sketches made on site, she compiles, manipulates, and then pieces together fragments to arrive at a more subjective representation of place. This process of displacement and layering expands upon her initial explorations of the city, suggesting mechanisms underlying the creation and destruction of these environments.

Access is a theme which recurs in Burnham’s work. Her works on paper often reveal the context of her relationship to the subject during the process of its depiction, through the inclusion of a dashboard or rear view mirror as a framing device, or the overlay of chain link fence and other barriers. The resulting images are compositionally labyrinthine and willfully difficult to navigate.

Burnham’s use of language amplifies this theme. Fragmentation and repetition of words bar the viewer’s access to any concrete literal reading, while retaining the sense of visual setting that typeface evoke. Her manipulation and rearrangement of words and letterforms not only heightens the viewer’s sense of disorientation within the space, but also suggests ambient sound and a specific mood.

Amanda Burnham lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is an Assistant Professor at Towson University. She earned her B.A., with honors, at Harvard University and went on to earn an M.F.A. from Yale University. In Baltimore, she has participated in solo and group exhibitions at the Creative Alliance at the Patterson, Julio Art Gallery (Loyola University), and the Stamp Gallery (the University of Maryland at College Park). Other selected venues include Dorsch Gallery (Miami, FL), Christina Ray Gallery (New York, NY), GV/AS Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), The Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Harrington Arts (San Francisco, CA), The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, The Toledo Museum of Art, and the Cranbrook Institute of Art.