Erin Elyse Burns: To Take the Shape of the Container

In May 2019, Jack Straw and Arts and Visually Impaired Audiences (AVIA) presented an accessible art workshop at Jack Straw in conjunction with Erin Elyse Burns’s exhibit To Take the Shape of the Container, which combined sculpture, video, and sound effects created in the studio to emphasize minute details one might fixate upon when the noise of city life is absent.

At the beginning of the workshop, AVIA’s Jesse Minkert described the exhibit for all the participants, including the video projections and the sculptural elements, and Erin discussed her inspirations and process. One they’d experienced the whole exhibit, students went into the studio with Erin, Jesse, and Jack Straw’s engineers to create their own sound effects and record short spoken phrases and words that arose from experiencing the installation.

Next, Erin led the students in a tactile artmaking activity using ribbon and wooden armatures, inspired by the large sculpture in the gallery, which Erin made from five miles of black ribbon. At the end, everyone went into the gallery with their sculptures and listened back to the soundscape they’d created in the gallery space.

    

Artists

Erin Elyse Burns, photo by Rafael Soldi

Erin Elyse Burns

Erin Elyse Burns’s interdisciplinary art practice navigates territory within the disciplines of photography, video, installation, the performative gesture, and artifact. Her work is often influenced by an attraction to…

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Photo of Jesse Minkert

Jesse Minkert

Jesse Minkert’s work has appeared in about fifty literary journals including the Cream City Review, Confrontation, Mount Hope, the Floating Bridge Review, the Minetta Review, Poetry Northwest, Common Knowledge…

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Exhibits

Erin Burns - To Take the Shape of the Container

Erin Elyse Burns | To Take the Shape of the Container

April 5 – June 8, 2019

To Take the Shape of the Container is a multimedia exhibition that interweaves experiences of contemplative practice with loss and persistent mental imagery. From visions…

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