LINDSAY M BURKE

“A Shift in the House”

An Essay on Lindsay Burke’s Recent Paintings

Written by Amanda Horowitz

There’s a surveillance tit in your painting, do you see it? There, in the roof of your home. It’s either a tit or a mosquito bite, I cannot tell. Sometimes young girls have mosquito bites for tits. Or that’s what I’ve heard them called when they’re small. Puberty bites a young girl, and she watches as her body swells with sex and confusion. My body could be a fountain one day. I could be a honeysuckle plant, ripped and sucked raw.

I think I’ve been through puberty at least ten times. My body time travels and mutates, one day it’s a grey hair, the next day I’m getting my period for the first time. Today I am a smelly, leaking faucet, but last week I had major clog.

Lindsay’s paintings unearth the tension between what is repressed and what can no longer be held in, diagraming a process of leakage in all its meaning: they cry and experience loss, they tell a secret, they reveal confident or illicit information. Leakage is a bodily word, speaking to an unsolidified interiority. It’s water coming out of a pipe, a hole in the house, a potential disaster. The drainage pipes and plumbing systems in the paintings establish routes in which excess goes into hiding, slipping underneath our feet and out of sight. I’m reminded of all the slimy materials that come out of my body that tell me I’m alive — but also disgusting.

Leakage is also the repressed desire that refuses a neat placement in the home or “proper” society. Excess can be described as desire triumphing over reality — a plenitude of meaning. It’s the overflow, the too, too much, trying to hold it together as it’s clearly falling apart.

As an adult, I practice Qi Gong. I shake up and down from my kidneys so that all the excess energy leaks out from the space between my genitals and asshole. My teacher, who I watch from the computer screen, tells me to feel the excess liquid drop from this place. Allow it to fall to the floor and be absorbed and recycled into the roots beneath your feet. I close my eyes and stare inside my organs while I shake out the kidneys. I look like a home. I fill the empty kidney rooms with pillows and chairs from the salvation army, objects that once lived in other people's bodies, but today I slurp up from the roots and hold them in my own form.

These paintings have camera holes, clocks instead of brains, and plumbing systems that zig zag us through the chaotic sublimation of body and home. In many of the paintings, a female silhouette in side profile is hidden among camouflage, puddles, and architectural geometry. Laid like bricks and fitted like pipes into the brute and playful schemas, she fits so well, sometimes you cannot even see her. There’s a militancy to all these images. A self-regiment and control that comes from living in a world where you can buy a cheap surveillance system on Amazon and perform statecraft within the safety of your home. These paintings signal the coldness beneath care, and blur the lines between self-reflection and self-maintenance.

Someone recently defined the sublime to me as the “uh-oh moment.” There’s a nice perversity to this response to highbrow aesthetic theory. It turns the inspired gasp of awe and terror into something a mother might say to her child after he wets his pants. “Oh, baby, it’s okay, you just had an uh-oh moment.” There’s also Kristeva’s take on the sublime: “In the symptom, the abject permeates me, I become abject. Through sublimation, I keep it under control. The abject is edged with the sublime.”

The other night, my Instant-Pot exploded and pea soup shot out from its nob. There was no way to stop the boiling-hot geyser, so I let it spew itself empty, and by the end, my kitchen walls were covered in yellow-green slime. I was laughing in shock. I live alone, and sometimes it feels like I am a cartoon woman, making messes and going “OOPS! Did I do that?” There is a real self-amusement to being alone and making the mess. I wonder if this is how Lindsay feels when she’s painting. Horrified and laughing at the disorder, sending her alter ego down the drain or creating a machine that cannot tell if it’s making the mess or cleaning it up.

It makes sense to me that Lindsay essentially nudged her reference images onto the paintings. She paints the illusion of print-outs and drawings taped onto the canvas. I love this, to make something look precarious and in the swarm of thought. The paintings are the shrapnel of thinking and processing. They make and break conclusions, and try to touch a truth or explanation to something that is too large to grasp. Like a clock or really anything circular, the boundaries between opposites always meet up at one point. The mess gets made and cleaned. The lover feels satisfaction and disappointment. All the work I’ve seen of hers wonders about the frenzy of opposition, how much it sucks that we are all these things at once. Her paintings ask, Whatever should I do with all these feelings?

-Amanda Horowitz, 2021