Kristian Burford

Born 1974, Adelaide, South Australia

In eyes of the precocious Kristian Burford, the Big Apple still looks like the centre of the artistic universe – well, at least his artistic universe which feeds on sculptural hyper–realism and urban decadence, and which is cosmologically constructed around fictive and poetic excess.

Perhaps mindful of New York's Robert Gober and Eric Fischl, Burford's cunningly orchestrated mise en scene punctures our mundane reality with charged psycho-sexual taboo, the sort that easily conforms itself to a Lacanian analysis of soft porn literature or film. But worry not, 12:17 Melissa... is a user-friendly installation that monumentalizes the orgasmic, self–feeding female body as an ordinary prop of mod living and allows just enough theory and perversity of subject/object relations to keep the author, protagonist and viewer on the edge.

M.A. Greensteinfrom her Samstag catalogue essay,  Back to the Future – From Wry to Rave
 
1999 Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship
1999 MFA, Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles, USA 
1996 Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours), South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia, Adelaide