Jessica Burko has been a working photographer since 1985 and has exhibited at the Attleboro Museum, Arlington Center for the Arts, and most recently, the Jamaica Plain Open Studios juried exhibition. She holds a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design, an MFA from Rochester Institute of Technology, and teaches in Easton, MA at Stonehill College where she is also the Director of the Cushing-Martin Gallery.

Burko is equally fascinated by abandoned and lived in architectural spaces, and photographs in old factories, buildings, and basements all over New England. Featured online are selections from two series: Glances and her most recent effort, Figure/Ground. In Glances, she points her camera at the overlooked, collecting lost moments and visual gestures. After looking at several, one begins to consider exactly where the glance was (up, straight-ahead, down) before being hunted and captured. The Glances are produced as mixed media pieces, transforming a fleeting moment into a permanent object—images are digitally printed on watercolor paper, coated and then mounted to wood, and finally sealed with clear acrylic. In Figure/Ground, Burko focuses on the connections between person and place, body and surroundings, by way of models and a diptych format.

PAST PRESENTATIONS

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about the Northeast Exposure.

Glances

It is a searching and a yearning that drives the work. Finding a safe place, finding a place to hide. Looking through windows, wishing to be somewhere else, somewhere better. Fantasizing, daydreaming, picturing and reinventing the past. These are the forces that encourage my exploration of abandoned buildings, and dilapidated towns. There’s a sadness in neglected space and in the evidence that history has been cast aside. The sadness brings a quiet, and the quiet brings the camera. When I look at a scarred wooden wall I imagine the hands that built it, and the hands that created the wound. The work in Figure/Ground is a continued path from dislocation to resolution, exploring the connections between home, mind, body, and how these notions relate to each other when bombarded with too many and too much.

The images in Figure/Ground were photographed with a variety of cameras including a Fuji S5000 digital, a Canon Rebel 2000, a Kowa 6, and an assortment of plastic and no-name cameras found at yard sales. All of the prints in this series are created digitally in my studio on watercolor paper from an Epson 3000 printer.

- Jessica Burko

A moment of clarity, a moment of confusion.
What’s seen out of the corner of the eye.
What is seen out of the corner of the eye?

Sometimes a split second is lost
and sometimes it leaves an indelible indent
in the center of the brain, becoming either a memory to forget
or one remembered frequently.

This series of Glances explores fragments of time
existing awake, in sleep,
and the dark minutes in between.

- Jessica Burko