Absolute Zero Nowhere

Jan 22nd – Feb 25th, 2005

A solo show by Paul Burn

“Absolute Zero Nowhere” is a solo show displaying New York artist Paul Burn’s large-scale sculptures and installations. He uses sculptural tableaus and dioramas to investigate fantasies of eternal wilderness and the powers of Nature to negotiate with the expansionist practices of human development. The works, often featuring elements of a frozen and stilled winterscape, fuse systems based on scientific practice and engineering with environmentalist politics and a romanticist perspective.

works included:

Portal, a vacuum-formed airplane window, set into the center of a wall in a large empty room which invites the viewer to look out onto a vast landscape of mountains modeled on an Antarctic landscape, with a seamless backlit sky and a fog machine producing realistic clouds;

Grand Canyon, a stereo-lithographic model of the Grand Canyon produced using stone from the actual canyon;

Two, a figurative sculpture depicting two figures on top of a snowy, hairy cliff, coexisting and yet not cohering;

and the Flux Factory-commissioned Ice Cave , an enormous crawl-through monument and perennial Flux favorite.