Bill Burns: Beatrix Ruf Protect Us: A Project About Longing

Curated by Jennifer Matotek, Director/Curator, Dunlop Art Gallery in collaboration with Stuart Reid, Director/Curator, Rodman Hall Art Centre. November 28, 2014 – January 18, 2015 at Central Gallery.

Additional Information

Artist Talk: Friday, November 28, 6:00 pm, RPL Film Theatre
Opening Reception: Friday, November 28, 7:00 pm, Central Gallery
The Goat Milking performance: Saturday, November 29, 3:00 pm, Central Gallery
Exhibition Tours: Saturdays and Sundays, 2:00 pm, Central Gallery

Beatrix Ruf Protect Us: A Project About Longing brings together Bill Burns’ recent works dealing with longing, particularly longing for success, for assistance, for recognition, for a different type of world. With tongue planted firmly in cheek, Burns makes overt pleas to art world celebrities, critiquing the political system that supports them. The solo exhibition will be comprised of several bodies of work, including the watercolour painting series A Brownnoser’s Story; small scale models of the world’s great museums with signs spelling out his request to the powerbrokers on top of the roofs; and bobbleheads of famous art world curators, in addition to other 2D works, sculptures and video pieces. Of the exhibition, Burns writes: "Beatrix Ruf Protect Us deploys a strategy of radical banality along with playing possum, known in animal behaviour as thanatosis. Thanatosis is a form of self-mimicry whereby the animal mimic imitates itself in a dead state. Here I am asking for deliverance and intercession." Beatrix Ruf Protect Us: A Project About Longing will tour across Canada in 2015-18, and will be accompanied by a publication co-produced by Dunlop Art Gallery, Rodman Hall Art Centre, and YYZ Books.

Bill Burns was born in Regina, Saskatchewan in 1957 and has lived and worked as an artist in Toronto, Canada and London, England. His work has been exhibited in major museums and biennial exhibitions since the 1990s.

Bill Burns, Beatrix Ruf Protect Us: A Project About Longing (Installation View), 2015. Photo by Don Hall.