• Dawnja Burris

Dawnja Burris

Chaco Reimagined

 

 

 

My work is strategically composed of photographs of photographs, and it asserts for an account of reality that is recursively fictional.  It admits and elaborates upon the artificiality of its techniques in order to examine where relationships between the components of a constructed image are not always immediately sensical. 

I recognize the constrictions of photography designated as an objective and indexed representation of reality and the absence of immediate “truth” in and of itself, and my use of  doubled imagery presents a fictional order to be perceived on its own terms, admitting its historical precedence but with deviant fidelity to itself.  

This series, produced at Chaco Culture National Historical Park in Northwestern New Mexico references and confronts a prevailing subscription to realism and the associated ideological precedents of its photographic representation.

The actions taken in the production of the imagery simultaneously create and critique in order to bypass the prescriptive readings of the dominant narratives ascribed to the landscape, the 900 year-old architecture and the ancestral Puebloan peoples who inhabited the area. 


Bio: Dawnja Burris was born in Colorado, and raised in West Texas and Southern New Mexico. Burris is a wanderer and psycho-geographer living for many years in New York City, but drawn to her native desert southwest. As a media studies scholar, she is fascinated with oral traditions, early image making, and storytelling techniques and technologies—especially in how conceptions of human and animal life practices merge, converge, and continue in contemporary life. She aims to tease out, through image montages and overlays, the contradictions in modern life through traces of animal spirits. Burris sees art, technology, and nature as interlaced. Her work concentrates on the ubiquitous images of animals that pervade our human world, proceeding from ancient practices of figuring animals, producing imagery that commingle the boundaries between fiction and reality. Her techniques have proceeded from the context of tableau settings into which her placed subject matter may be seen as hyperreal, at once elusive yet persistently present.
Contact: dawnja@dawnjaburris.com
 Website: http://www.dawnjaburris.com/
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