Sylvia Burtenshaw: Contemporary Multimedia Artist

Still from Pleasure, 2019

Born 1995, Horsefly B.C. living as a guest on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Skwxwú7mesh Úxwumixw, Stó:l?, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, mixed-media artist Sylvia Burtenshaw organizes an investigation into the circumstances of culture influenced by technology, while searching to find truth in the question: Are we alike? Motivated by a persistent and nervous self analysis, it is through her insecurity-driven obsession to find alikeness that Burtenshaw finds herself continually turning to different mediums and methods to communicate this question. Her works are often realized as interactive installations and sculptures, using sound, photo and video to replicate lived events and/or self explorations. Her practise is preoccupied by themes of sentimentality and personal anecdote as means to inspire solidarity at a large scale, challenging the conventions of the art object, and on the potential of an image. She presents these themes through motifs of the face, image circulation, and the 'everyday' object often alternating between objects both functional and ephemeral. Burtenshaw's interest in the ephemeral isn't limited to the object. She often uses installation to simulate a nonrepresentational subject, such as relief (Vent, 2018) or potential (Photos: Viral, 2018).

Burtenshaw's current projects see the artist exploring film and performance, such as Pleasure (2019) a 70s-era feminism inspired video performance, in which the image of femininity is destroyed by the artist's destruction of her own body during performance.