THE THIRD FUTURE: A SELF-PORTRAIT
CURATOR'S NOTE
Ainsley Burrows
The Third Future: A Self-Portrait
Raised in Kingston, Jamaica, and Brooklyn, New York, Ainsley Burrows is a multidisciplinary artist whose upbringing is in the foreground of his art. His work references the many lessons, stories, historical figures, events, movements, and diasporas that have shaped his perspective.
The Third Future: A Self-Portrait delivers the essence of a man through a philosophical lens turned inward. The body of work created for this exhibition gives representation and visual language to a modern way of rendering self-portraiture. The Third Future fuses different aspects of Burrows’ storytelling journey from prose to lyrics to performance to painting. Working primarily in acrylic paint, the saturated tones and textured surfaces draw the eye and fuel the imagination while the scale of the pieces opens the pathway to an abstract experience that is immediate, personal, and transports the viewer.
This exhibition shows we are more than our hair, eyes, lips, skin, and limbs. This is a new self-portrait. Influenced by literature and themes of Afrofuturism, magical realism, and immigration, and the tumultuous path to belonging. His paintings emerge from layer upon layer until he achieves his perfect final composition from an alchemic process where images are deconstructed and reimagined.
Burrows uses sweeping brushstrokes to create curving lines with abstract figures that flow into one another to represent the complexity of immigration and the tumultuous path to belonging. His paintings emerge from layer upon layer until he achieves his perfect final composition from an alchemic process where images are deconstructed and reimagined.
Burrows mainly uses three methodologies he has created and developed, adding his unique language to the abstract expressionist cannon. Neo Chaos is characterized by expressive gestures and lines, and deep, passionate swaths of color. Raktism is his search for the fourth dimension, characterized by boundaries, echoes, repetition, and experimentation with leaps of time and space on a 2D canvas. String Theory uses exaggerated motions that sometimes require full body movement. “Ainsley’s abstraction unfolds a deliberate yet fluid hand,” says curator Kirk Shannon- Butts. His spirited personality is the genesis of his art and the basis of his creativity. The result is vibrant, kinetic, and full of his life’s lessons and possesses a profound self-awareness that is integral to the production and process of Ainsley’s art practice.”