Julian Burgin - Domestic Science
14  June  -  15  December  2010
Vital Arts Gallery, Barts Hospital

Since 2008 Julian Burgin has been working continuously on this series of diptychs, entitled Domestic Science. His work features his daughter in familiar domestic settings, accompanied by an image showing vignettes of daily life; laundry on a clothes line, suburban houses, stacks of dishes. At first glance, these snapshot-like images seem incidental, yet the formal similarities between the images in each pairing, and between the paired images themselves, emerge as a driving force behind the work. Seen as a whole, the series establishes a rhythm of interlocking images that reveals the latent poetry found close to home.

In describing his photographs, Burgin has said, “I was struck by the connections emerging between certain pairs of photographs. It was as if one picture was affecting another, and I was reminded of a phrase used in physics, 'spooky action at a distance', used to describe how two separated, and unrelated objects seem to anticipate each other."