BOBBIE BURGERS

"In this new body of work, I kept returning to the idea of depth of field: the way some things are brought sharply into focus while others recede, blur, or hover just beyond recognition. My work is built through layers: light washes, stains, printed fragments, collage, then a thick glut of oil bar or a textural brushstroke bringing the work into focus. Some gestures sit plainly on the surface; others are buried, softened, or only partially visible, like memories. While still rooted in florals, these works begin to feel more like the landscapes– not landscapes in the traditional sense, which I have not painted for years, but fields of texture and material, where a composition grows from a first stain of pigment into pastures of movement and atmosphere. 

With this series, I found myself reading older poetic texts about the cycles of nature, including Goethe’s writing on the life cycle of plants. I had expected to find something reaffirming, but instead found much of it surprisingly heavy: earthly hopes, buried love, vanished joy, the vanity of chasing permanence. It felt desperate in a way that was the opposite of what I wanted these pieces to hold. I have always been more interested in the optimism of cycles: the way nature collapses and returns, the way plants self-seed, disappear and re-emerge, completely self-sufficient and quietly resilient. Walking past fields of cosmos in Montreal- tall white and yellow flowers returning on their own along streets and edges- I’m struck again by how miraculous that persistence is. There is decay, and loss, and endings, but there is also the lust of young life that carries through to the very last moment, even as summer yields quietly to fall. 

Several titles in the exhibition circle around this tension. When Winds are on it to Cast Away speaks to movement, dispersal and release: the moment when something is carried off, but also the beginning of its next life elsewhere. Hello Stranger Goodbye Friend holds the same contradiction, the sadness of parting and the charge of encounter. In many ways, the work itself has been self-seeding for years. A fragment of one painting is photographed, printed, cut apart, collaged, and allowed to blossom into something new before circling back into the larger paintings. Each work carries past, present and future at once."