Painting and Reading

Description:

Western Front presented a solo exhibition by William S. Burroughs, featuring one painting and twelve iridescent, hallucinatory works on paper. 

Burroughs had been engaged with visual media since the 1950s, but turned to painting in the early 1980s after noticing that the splintered holes made by shotgun blasts in plywood resembled paint splatters. He developed a technique that involved hanging cans of paint from strings and exploding them over the picture surface with different gauges of shot. He would then rework the image using calligraphy brush work (connecting to a tradition of painting and writing), spray paint, stencils and collage. 

In these works, the “cut-up” method Burroughs applied to his poetry came full circle in painting: transformed through the force of a .9 shot, material moved from deconstruction to destruction.

As part of the exhibition, Burroughs also gave a reading at the Ridge Theatre.

Curated by Hank Bull.