Exhibition: Julian Burgin
Domestic Science
Julian Burgin
Jun – Sept 2010
St Barts Hospital Gallery
For his first solo exhibition in the UK, Julian Burgin will present a suite of diptychs entitled Domestic Science. Burgin has been working continuously on this series since 2008 when he first starting photographing his daughter, who is a constant figure throughout the work. Within each of these pairings, we see the lone girl in a familiar setting—at home, in a playground, in a car—while the accompanying image shows a vignette of daily life—laundry on a clothes line, suburban houses, stacks of dishes. At first glance, these snapshot-like images seem incidental, yet the formal similarities between the images in each diptych emerge as a driving force behind the work. Seen as a whole, the series establishes a rhythm of interlocking images that reveals the poetry found on our doorstep.
Burgin has described each image in the work as a spontaneous reaction to the world around him. He has said of the work, “I was struck by the connections emerging between certain pairs of photographs. It was as if one picture was affecting another, and I was reminded of a phrase used in physics: ‘Spooky action at a distance’ used by Einstein to describe how two separated, and unrelated, objects seem to anticipate the other”.
