Nancy Burson’s “Quantum Entanglement” Paintings Turn a Phone Camera Into the Viewing Device
Nancy Burson’s latest paintings ask viewers to do something unusual in a gallery: look at them through a phone. In “Light Matter,” on view at Heft Gallery through May 2, the 78-year-old artist’s “Quantum Entanglement” works read at first as white dots drifting across black fields. Seen through a camera, however, the surfaces begin to flicker with a faint shimmer of color and a deeper spatial charge.
Burson has long treated image-making as a way of testing perception. A pioneering figure in photography and digital art, she was among the first artists to use digital technology in photography, and she became widely known in the 1980s for composite portraits that merged multiple faces into single archetypal images. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, and she has had exhibitions at New York University’s Grey Art Museum and the MIT List Visual Arts Center.
The new paintings extend that inquiry into a more atmospheric register. Burson has described the works as a visual translation of the energy grid she believes underlies the universe, and as a form of evidence for what she sees but others may not immediately register. The result is less a straightforward abstraction than a proposition about how technology changes attention itself.
That idea has shaped Burson’s career from the beginning. She moved to New York in 1968, at a moment when artist-run galleries, conceptual experiments, and the rise of personal computing were beginning to reshape the city’s cultural life. After telling an artist that she wanted to make “an age machine,” she was directed to Experiments in Art and Technology, the organization founded by Billy Klüver, Fred Waldhauer, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Whitman. Through that network, she met computer graphics innovator Carl Machover, who introduced her to early digital tools in White Plains, New York.
Machover then referred her to MIT, where Nicholas Negroponte connected her with molecular biologist Thomas Schneider. Working on weekends at MIT, Burson and Schneider developed the age-progression system that led, in 1981, to a patent for producing an image of a person’s face at a different age. The technology later entered law enforcement use, including FBI missing-children cases involving Etan Patz.
Burson’s practice has repeatedly moved between art, science, and public imagination. Her composite portraits, including “Androgyny (6 Men + 6 Women)” and “Mankind (Oriental, Caucasian and Black weighted according to current population statistics),” examined identity, race, and representation with unusual directness. In 2000, she also created the Human Race Machine for Zaha Hadid’s Millennium Dome in London.
“Light Matter” places that history in a new key. The paintings may look spare at first glance, but they continue Burson’s long project of making perception itself the subject of the work.
