Mining the Ruins: Andrea Burgay

My work elevates the overlooked and the mundane through a process of cutting, reconfiguring and unifying a variety of handmade, found and discarded materials. Using paper ephemera whose original relevance has been lost or abandoned, I integrate the past histories of these objects into the present. Their disintegration and decay speak of the passage of time and the possibility of redemption for the obsolete.

These works on found books and postcards evoke corroded objects, accumulated piles, forgotten things left to decay. Some are forms spilling out into space, others are composed, enclosed, keeping some of their secrets behind the surface. One can imagine these objects taking on lives of their own, the neglected memories and ignored histories pouring out of them and mixing—growing and deteriorating at the same time. Either documents of the past or reimagined fictions, these objects no longer communicate what they once did, but now explore the realms of remembrance and projection, nostalgia and evolution.