2018 CJL Finalist: Gary Burnley

In her memoir, “Negroland”, Margo Jefferson observes, ”Being an Other, in America, teaches you to imagine what can’t imagine you. That’s your first education.” As an African American artist, my perception has been molded by the bifurcated expectations and contradictions of that unimaginable existence. The physical collages and stereographic devices I create encourage dissociated ideals of beauty and identity to merge in the eye and mind of the viewer. Resulting in the conflation of optical rivalries, the portrait amalgamations and coerced unions explore representation, meaning and memory through their contrast that imagines unimaginable occurrences.