Burtonwood & Holmes/Robert Burnier: Subtle Combat
Around the Coyote Gallery - 1935 ½ W. North Ave. Opening reception: April 6 from 7-11pm Exhibition Dates: April 6 - May 5, 2007 Wicker Park Bucktown Gallery Association Second Saturday Art Walk April 13 from 6-10pm Press Clips: War for Sale, Chicago Journal, May 3, 2007 Artists' Works Send Their Message, Pioneer Local.com, April 4, 2007
	Chicago, IL- Around the Coyote, one of Chicago's most diverse non-profit emerging arts organizations, is pleased to announce Subtle Combat, a dual exhibition featuring work by collaborative artists Burtonwood and Holmes, and self-taught artist Robert Burnier. This exhibition seeks to illustrate ways in which artists today are choosing to confront the subtleties and complexities of living in a time of war. Favoring a holistic look at our decision to go to war -- rather than an oversimplification of the social, political and economic times used in so much protest art -- these artists have found ways to question our present course while still working with an aesthetic beauty. Burtonwood and Holmes' site-specific installation of large and small scale military tanks along with various paintings will be accompanied by Burnier's large and small scale grid paintings.

In their mixed media paintings, sculptures, and installations, Burtonwood and Holmes incorporate advertising material with war imagery. They have said about their work, "We use these advertising materials to represent our culture. Beneath distractions like shopping and entertainment, serious issues are being forgotten. In effect consumer culture camouflages the war. In our installations/paintings advertising images of pork loin are juxtaposed with battle tanks. We are trying to jar the viewer by repurposing something innocuous like junk mail as a backdrop for the war."

Robert Burnier's work is comprised of many small paintings arranged in a grid system creating a larger image. Burnier chooses the subject matter of war - fighter jets, nuclear blasts - and through the process of deconstructing, then reconstructing the images, creates paintings unashamed of their aesthetic beauty and purity. Burnier explains that "the subjects of my work are made partial, disassembled, transformed, inverted, reconstituted and renewed by a basis of many systems - the Cartesian Coordinates. Through their use, the outlines, harmonies, fissures and conflicts of human system-building can be brought forward for examination ... Repeated use of the grid goes beyond functioning as a visual and thematic tool and takes on a totemic presence."

Burtonwood & Holmes

Tom Burtonwood received his B.A. in Fine Art from Loughborough University in 1997 and his M.F.A from Southern Illinois University in 2001. Holly Holmes received her B.F.A. from Southern Illinois University. Working collaboratively since 1999, Burtonwood and Holmes have participated in numerous international and national exhibitions, many of which have been Chicago-based. Burtonwood and Holmes's work has been published in New American Paintings, the TWO STEPS BACK Catalogue, and the VICE TWO STEPS BACK 2005 Calendar distributed in Japan. Robert Burnier received his B.S. in Computer Science from Shippensburg University and is a self-taught artist who has been a part of several group exhibitions in the Chicago area. His work has been reviewed in NewCity Magazine and the Chicago Sun Times.

Robert Burnier