Ben Burke combines installation, puppetry, and live performance to present theatrical events informed by fables and vaudeville.  In 2008 he participated inSwimming Cities of the Switchback Sea, where he created seven boats made from reclaimed materials and modified car engines. The boats served as moving stages for his hour-long play, which was performed as the […]

My work attempts to unify and highlight the relationship between interior and exterior experience through processes that involve time and devotion.  I employ folk art and craft process, typically hand and needle work such as embroidery, patchwork, and crochet, as well as voice, language, narrative, and gesture, to create scores – objects, environments, and opportunities – […]

I create art that explores popular myth and rituals.  Our shared mythologies become the material for my art projects.  My work deals with my personal experience as an American and the “performativity” within my culture.  From the American warrior myth to muscle cars and biker culture, my participatory installations accentuates the fine line between reality […]

I consider myself a process artist and it is often during the act of scavenging for materials that I meditate and develop the concepts for the work I am about to create. I often leave the initial stages of my work open and uncertain while intuitively working out a resolution that will decide its final […]

My own life’s story compels me to find value in everyday, discarded objects. These items may be discarded by humans or by nature. I intuitively respond to the line, texture, and composition of each object and disregard its purpose or function. Once pulled out of context and presented alone, the object emits qualities of fragility, […]

At every construction zone, a reoccurring image denies to be overlooked. Intersecting vectors from telephone poles, cranes, and wood debris build up geometries and cruciforms that accumulate to semblances of ships.  Swaying power and telephone lines resemble towering sails and riggings that move uncontrollably due to an approaching storm.  A space that symbolizes construction and […]

My work investigates the physical beauty of common mass-produced objects as they approach obsolescence.  Ubiquitous items of day-to-day life – the newspaper, 35mm slide, or hard-cover book, for example – are quickly becoming cultural artifacts as these media change modes due to technology and the hope for a less wasteful lifestyle.  Approaching sculpture, painting, and […]

My artwork depicts cultural collapse: between producer and consumer, viewer and viewed, and simulated and real. I appropriate material, bend rules of consent, re-stage events, and invite viewers to alter my exhibited pieces.  These acts and products reflect a shift in cultural production – where ownership dips into a zone of ambiguity and image and sound is […]

There are: humans, animals, objects, plants, fungi, lichens, bacteria, the elements, planets, stars, the four forces (of which, I am only concerned with gravity and electromagnetism) and mathematics. I make objects so that they can exist outside my brain. I make puppets so that they can be animated. I do that so that people can […]

Bill has been a painter, designer and illustrator for over 40 years. As a staff artist at the San Francisco Chronicle, he illustrated news features and visual essays, including a weekly column “The Bay Folk Sketchbook,” in which he interviewed and drew portraits of 84 unique individuals in their workplaces. This experience taught him the value and passion workers […]