One of Australia’s most exciting international exports Ian Burns created Clouds for the 2012 Melbourne Art Foundation Commission. 

Against the cultural backdrop of the increasingly virtual nature of the screen-based image, Ian Burns presented a sculptural work that links the technological screen with embodied experience. An imposing sculptural form, Clouds presents the viewer with a pseudo-cinematic series of scenes that suggest a narrative but without end. Generated within the sculpture itself, the scenes are based on images of motion, specifically flight: ladders, toys, tables, lights, salad bowls and other everyday items are repurposed towards the live re-creation of imagery of the clichéd cinematic sublimity of air travel.

Displaying images alongside the process of their very production, Burns builds a diorama of our contemporary visual world. By the inventive nature of the construction, and the use of commonplace objects to create believable live video renditions of apparently real footage, Burns’ work encourages a playful spirit of investigation.

His new work for Melbourne Art Fair 2012, Clouds, was created in the months preceding the Fair at acclaimed Yarra Valley winery Domaine Chandon where Ian Burns was Artist in Residence.

Ian Burns is an Australian artist based in New York. Named recently in the ‘Future Greats’ edition of Art Review Magazine (UK), he is an artist on the move, with a forthcoming solo exhibition and commission at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne and an exhibition at mother’s tankstation, Dublin along with the Melbourne Art Fair Commission. Ian Burns is a current recipient of a Queensland College of Art, Griffith University Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship. Burns creates what are best described as kinetic assemblages, combining an amalgam of found objects from two dollar shops and department stores like Ikea, with digital technologies, flat screens, tiny closed-circuit spy cameras and cannibalised bits of everyday household ‘stuff’.

Clouds was commissioned by the Melbourne Art Foundation for the Melbourne Art Fair 2012 and was donated to the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia.