To compliment this show, there was a talk & live performance by Burgoyne at Lille III Université, March 7th.

This new work OK-NO by Burgoyne extends key aspects of his work. The role of play meets the process led and rule based as an interrogation of drawings conceptual framework alongside the body’s comprehension, extension and dispersal of means to be within that site.

OK-NO is both affirmation and negation of a position. It begins with Burgoyne aloft 2 stacks of multicoloured floor cloths, seeking to maintain a position on top of all the floor cloths and keeping them together for 3 hours (3 hours is the time the resulting projection is shown each night). Simultaneously, using a IPhone camera, Burgoyne tries to focus on the word ‘chemist’ (pharmacie) on the shop front across the street from the gallery. The stacks of cloths slip, slide and disperse, back and forth, as does Burgoyne while attempting to maintain the unity of this fluctuating arena of cloths and the view ahead.

This position, that Burgoyne begins with, is less ‘The window on Europe’ that was grandly evoked by Peter the Great. Instead, it is a more mundane one. Positions of viewer and viewed become uncertain and in disarray, while the portal, in the form of the actual window that sits between these positions, seems more tangible.

In OK-NO Burgoyne falls back and forth as he tries to keep all the cloths underfoot together. As these activities advance, the view we see in the resulting projection like Burgoyne is one that seems increasingly unstable & perhaps unsustainable.

The window Burgoyne’s antics is projected toward brings its own reality in contrast to the virtual one, the wordplay of OK-NO may deny (Okno is the Russian word for window).

Between a here and there, the filter that is the window, in its materiality maybe stable albeit fragile, while on either side of this portal, all may be far from it. A visit to the chemist for some remedy, may be necessary.