Live from the Studio with Mollie Burke

“My proposal for the residency at Griffin Art Projects is to inquire into and consider the notion of infrastructure in relation to the tension of material and immaterial spaces. Infrastructure, both the digital and the analog forms, mold and create spaces. As Barney Warf and Santa Arias note in The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, “Geography matters, not for the simplistic and overly used reason that everything happens in space, but because where things happen is critical to knowing why and how they happen”. As the buildings around the lower mainland are torn down to replace and meet the demands of new infrastructural growth, forces of gentrification and novel forms of geo mapping create new spatialities and modes of understanding space, time, and connection to community and history. My intention is to study the shifts in housing infrastructure alongside the introduction of internet wires, communication  lines, and data storage. I will work with yupo and mylar paper with drawing, painting, and printmaking techniques to expand on my practise of layering and creating a broken picture plane.”  - Mollie Burke

Mollie is a multi-disciplinary artist considering the relationship between computation and social abstraction. She lives and works in Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish territory. She holds a BA from McGill University in art history and cultural studies, a diploma of fine art from Langara, and a Masters of Fine Art from Emily Carr University of Art and Design. She was awarded the Bill Watson award for excellence in printmaking, the Barbara and Arne Vengshoel scholarship for outstanding contribution to the visual arts, and the SSHRC graduate scholarship for her research in mediation. She is an 2021 artist in residence at Material Matters research lab, was recently shortlisted for the 2021 Lind prize, and has shown in various spaces across Canada.